


the storm which shook the stables

by TaFuilLiom



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-17
Updated: 2020-11-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:01:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 47,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27597242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TaFuilLiom/pseuds/TaFuilLiom
Summary: Career-driven, brilliantly sharp and bike-loving: if this situation wasn’t as it was, Alex Danvers would be exactly Maggie’s type of woman.But as it was - with four alien murders all leading to the powerful multi-millionaire CEO of Danvers Bio-Solutions as the main suspect - falling in love wasn’t her main priority.Knowing Maggie’s luck, it may just happen anyway.
Relationships: Alex Danvers/Maggie Sawyer
Comments: 145
Kudos: 143
Collections: Sanvers Big Bang | 2020





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Who doesn't want to read a murder mystery based on a wealthy estate?
> 
> A huge, huge thank you to [ Lia](/users/SanversStrong/) for providing the fantastic artwork for this!
> 
> You can find her artwork [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27496096/chapters/67233910)

The crimson marker squeaked its trail across the whiteboard. It joined the fourth photograph to three predecessors, then pulled away. 

Four bodies found, all aliens, all in the last month. They were different species, different ages, appearances, locations. All dying mysterious deaths. Murdered, she suspected, but so far hadn’t proven.

A heavy grief collapsed into Maggie’s chest, forcing her to lean back against her desk for support. The ink had hardly dried, but already she felt lost. 

She clicked the lid back onto the marker, its bright rosy colour an affront to the information it had brought into view. 

“How did you die?” she asked the pictures. “Who killed you?”

She purposefully chose the pictures which the grieving families provided, rather than the photos the papers had used. Trashy media outlets wanted to vilify and violate these aliens: show their bodies as if the ugly violence enacted upon them was deserved somehow. 

But Maggie wanted to honour their victimhood. They were people before they were targets, demonstrated by smiling graduation photographs or snaps from a birthday party. 

The police weren’t interested in justice for these victims, and the public certainly didn’t have the opinion that they should chase it. These were foreigners in their city.

The search for answers fell to her, a private detective. 

She had tracked down CCTV footage, traversed the city’s alien network from north to south, ridden out to locations in the desert; but there was nothing. No rumours, no suggestions, not even a security guard to be bribed. Just families left with an empty chair at their table, wondering why their loved ones had been taken from them. 

At first, she actually suspected the police. They were known to be more than heavy handled with aliens with little consequence. But none of the four bodies had injuries which suggested the standard weapon carried by officers in the city. Then, she tried to find out about anti-alien activity, but as far as her mole in the online community was concerned, there was no dark web activity worth chasing. 

She tapped the marker against her knuckles, eyes flitting from face to face in the diamond shape she had arranged the pictures in. While they all held different occupations, lived in different parts of the city, were different ages, there was one single thing which linked all four victims. 

One single thing. As vague a connection as she could imagine, but a connection nonetheless.

They all died with a piece of card in their pocket, embossed with the Danvers Bio-Solutions logo. On the back was the address of the estate which acted as the family residence on the outskirts of National City. 

A throat cleared behind her. She dropped the marker, hand flying to the gun tucked in her waistband. But at the sight she found, she froze. 

“Winn, I’ve warned you before. Knock.”

His hair ruffled and frown scrunched, he shrugged his shoulders near his ears. “Jeez, jumpy much?”

She watched as he slung his laptop bag from his shoulder. “Yeah, a little.”

He clicked his teeth, throwing the bag up onto the desk. He unzipped it and slid out a thick red folder. 

When he held it out, she took it and flipped it open. “All here?”

“All here, all fake, all ready to ride,” he quipped, “Because, you know, you’ll be-”

He pretended he was holding horse reins and raised his knees in a double hop. 

“Yup, got it.”

She flicked through the references and photographs enclosed. Apart from her passport photo, signature and date of birth, everything else was a convincing lie. Her education, her previous employment, even her hobbies. 

He had done a great job.

She wasn’t sure why all four aliens had the Danvers family estate address on them when they died, but she needed to get into the estate to find out. When an opening appeared for a new stablehand, there was no way she could refuse. 

The problem was, the world of equestrian care for the wealthy was not a big one. The family were likely to have extensive vetting and though she was a PI with experience in faking her way into situations, she needed this to be an airtight alibi. Winn happily provided strong photoshop skills and fake references, the falseness knitted like a spider-web across the internet and beefing up her resume in order to avoid the family finding red flags.

“You’ve outdone yourself,” Maggie said, smirking as she shut the folder.

He pretended to tip his hat to her. “I hope you’ve recovered from your riding lessons.”

She winced. Yoga and cardio had not been enough to prepare her for those. Knowing she would need confidence and experience when joining the recruitment process, Maggie had crammed as many horse riding lessons into the past two weeks as she could. Those initial few days she chafed, barely able to walk. She had also enlisted additional help from an ex who was a veterinarian, trying to learn as much about horse care as she could. 

Still, when the email came through that she had gotten through the sifting process and won an interview for the position, it was worth the hard work. 

Winn hugged his laptop bag to his chest, looking at the whiteboard. 

“Do you think you’re going to find something there?” he asked. 

Maggie spun the red marker on her desk, hoping it wouldn’t be used to draw another line to a fifth victim’s face in the near future. In that single question, she heard all of his fear. 

She couldn’t offer any assurances. “I have no idea. But I need to find out why the victims all had the estate’s address on them when they died.”

“Maybe the family has a private laboratory on their estate? I’ve heard rumours.”

“Like a cartoon villain?”

He cracked a smile at this, and she smiled right back. He was too good at heart to be worried for too long, she made sure of that. 

“You might be right though,” she added, “The Danvers aren’t just multi-millionaire investors. At their core, they’re scientists too.”

“Which is where the problem lies. Control over both the finances and scientific direction of a major medical technology company with no external oversight.”

She opened her mouth to agree, but didn’t manage an answer. 

With a powerful boom, the building shook. The red marker rolled straight off her desk and out of reflex, Maggie scooped it up. 

Winn turned ghostly pale, promptly turning on his heel and bolting from Maggie’s office. She wasn’t far behind him, lurching down the stairwell and rushing towards outside.

All the people on the street craned their necks up to the sky, gaping in horror as a jet plane on fire came into view. Its flames were bright enough to light up the buildings it hurtled past. As it flew overheard, only a woman’s shrill scream was enough to pierce through the engine’s roars of alarm. 

“Oh my god,” Winn said, visibly trembling beside her.

Maggie could only watch, numbed by the sight of a plane heading down towards the city skyline, that red marker clutched in her hand.

She still had the marker later that night, watching the TV cable news reports of a mysterious girl saving the plane. The helicopter’s blinding floodlight washed over the plane as it bobbed in the river, trying to get a good view of the girl standing on the wing. It roved around in a circle, catching a familiar insignia: the  _ Danvers Bio-Solutions _ logo painted on the plane’s tail. 

The red marker created an angry circular indent in her palm as she clenched it in her fist. 

She was going to get that stablehand job. 

And she was going to find out what the hell was happening on that estate. 

~

Growing up in a rural town should have prepared her for this. But it didn’t. This was different. It was money. It was power. Influence. Even the very grass seemed different. She knelt on one knee, ran her fingers through the blades, warm and dry from the Californian heat.

The grass in Nebraska had been free. This grass was bought and owned. 

She fished in her pocket until she found the crumpled paper. As she drew it out, the dusk splashed the four names in a bloody hue. 

The list was gone from sight, crushed away, before she realised she had even made a fist. 

She carried the list of four names everywhere she went, hoping it wouldn’t grow longer. Every time it got too frayed, she would write it out again on fresh paper. She knew the list by heart now, but the physicality of the paper was a vital symbol. 

The horse behind her huffed, hoofing at the dirt. She straightened with a wry smile, dusting off her knee. 

“Yeah, yeah, I’m coming,” she said, strolling back to lift the reins of the impatient horse. She shoved the list back into her overalls and gently patted a strong, tawny flank, “Couldn’t wait, Gertrude?” 

Again, the horse huffed, pushing into her touch. She slung her foot into the stirrup and hoisted herself up into the saddle. Getting comfortable, she lifted the reins and drank in the view once more. 

The interview process had been a strange one, but she marked it down to the nature of the estate. It was conducted by the company’s CFO, rather than anyone working at the actual household. Hank Henshaw’s body language throughout the interview swung between curious and reserved, as if he was reading her very thoughts. 

Next day, she received a phone call asking her for an immediate start. 

Sunset splashed across the estate, reddening the landscape from the French gardens to the left all the way to the forest line on the right. She stared at the centre, the long lawn stretching up to the Danvers estate, wondering what the coming weeks would reveal. 

“Let’s go, girl,” she said, leading the horse off on a trot back down the winding hill path towards the stables. 

As Gertrude trotted down the grassy mount, she wondered if she was in over her head here. She never did undercover work that was a long game before. Usually, it was a single night, to gain entry or access to a single location. But this, embedding herself within the environment of a suspect, was beyond her experience. 

Hooves switched from padding along grass to clopping onto the path which swung right up to the main house. She headed that way, passing the open garage housing the five luxury cars. One was permanently covered in a sheet; she found out from Vasquez, the gardener, that it had been Jeremiah Danvers’ first purchase when the family found their fortune. It hadn’t been touched since he perished in a helicopter crash 14 years ago. 

“A helicopter crash,” Maggie mused, “And the family private jet almost going down.”

Questions upon questions; the biggest being, what lay inside the house that meant four murder victims died with the address in their very pockets?

The swoosh of the fountain was almost peaceful as Maggie veered them both to the left, through the French Gardens. Everything was symmetrical, the hedges shaped exactly the same on each side, the bushes almost identical in their flowering. She looked up to the house, spying which lights were still on. She had studied the blueprints extensively in the week since she got the job here. 

Her plan was simple. Earning the family’s trust, breaking and entering. Scooping private files, discovering the existence of anything untoward. There was no way to plan for all of the externalities. All of the ways this task could go wrong. But weeks of chasing leads to dead ends, of frightened aliens, she couldn’t afford to screw up this opportunity.

Gertrude’s hoofs crunched at the gravel under them in the neat pattern of her gait. Maggie’s own gut seemed to crunch into herself with another wave of panic about this assignment. She had to take her time, lean into this assignment, choose the timing of her moves very carefully. Yet she knew every day she waited… 

It wasn’t entirely unusual for her gut instincts to throw up red flags during investigations. It was part and parcel of the profession. Being a private investigator was less polished than being a detective, after all. It paid more generously for that exact reason, because she could maneuver herself into situations where she probably shouldn’t be. 

As she neared the stables, she saw a figure peering over one of the stable boxes. Coat a shock of blue against the browns of the stable, blonde hair thrown up into a ponytail. 

Kara. 

Maggie brought Gertrude to a stop outside the entrance, dismounting and walking her the rest of the way. Kara turned to greet them, pushing her hands in her pockets. 

“Hiya Gerty,” she said brightly, “Hello, Maggie.” 

“Miss Danvers,” Maggie said, beginning to work at the clasps of Gertrude’s rein. 

“Maggie!” Kara playfully chastised, “How many times? Call me Kara.” 

She kept her back to the blonde in order to hide her scowl. She tried to be friendly, keeping up appearances, but everytime she felt her guard slipping she remembered those four faces. And what was at stake. 

Kara didn’t seem to notice, her attention back on the arctic whtie stallion she was gently patting.

“How are we today Krypto?”

Going through the motions of the nighttime routine, Maggie tried not to alert Kara too much, both out of politeness and, well, that dread in her gut. She grabbed a wheelbarrow and marched it towards the mouth of the stables, ready to head to another outshed to grab fresh hay when Kara’s sudden confession stopped her. 

“Sometimes I like to come out after a long day,” Kara said, stroking down the horse’s long nose. “To clear my head.”

Maggie glanced up from the wheelbarrow, gripping its handles.  _ What do you do inside all day? _ she wondered.

Kara petted at Krypto’s neck as the horse’s nostrils flared. “Sometimes I wish it was different.”

Straightening, the solemn tone drew Maggie’s attention even further onto the pair. Krypto and Kara held eye contact. Even though she had had limited exposure to horses before this assignment, she was aware that there was intelligence there, and it almost seemed like they were silently communicating. 

After a beat or two, Kara turned and smoothed the sides of her coat. “Anyway. I’m gonna…” She thumbed behind her towards the estate house. 

“Goodnight Mi-” Maggie caught herself with a wry smile. “Kara.”

The beaming smile Kara returned was bright enough to drag the sun back up into the sky. “Goodnight, Maggie.”

Watching Kara’s blue coat retreat into the dusk, Maggie was once again wavered by that inner doubt. What had happened on this estate, or was happening even now as she wheeled out towards the outshed? 

When she left the stable for the night, a single light remained on in the upper row of front facing windows. A silhouette of a figure gazed out into the night, swinging open the latch and letting the old pane open. Maggie watched with wide eyes as they climbed onto the frame as if to dive out onto the ground below, but they looked back at a noise from inside, quickly climbing down, shutting the window and drawing the curtains. 

She stood there on the lawn for a long while, watching until the light in the room went out, wondering what the hell she had gotten herself into. 

~

When Maggie woke up to her ringing alarm clock the next day, that dread in her gut woke up with her. All throughout her morning routine, right up until she was down at the stables mucking out the horses, she had a heavy feeling in the pit of her stomach. 

She tried to shake it, tried to focus herself. She had never once gotten too afraid, or lost her head and backed out of an assignment. Nevermind that her current benefactor was paying much too generously for her to refuse, the very insinuation that the Danvers were exploiting aliens for their research was enough to make Maggie’s blood boil. 

But once the allegation subsided, she would return to that state of unease. She propped her shovel against the wall and asked herself why she - after all her years of experience - was feeling so uncertain about another shoe dropping. 

Then, in the quiet of the distance, a motorcycle engine riproared. 

And Maggie got her answer. 


	2. Chapter 2

Gripping the shovel handle, Maggie drew up straight at the motorcycle engine. Curiosity and nervous horses brought her to the mouth of the stables. The bike came closer and closer until the rider swung around the fountain at the front of the main house and brought it to a stop on the gravel. 

They kicked at the stand and dismounted the bike, standing tall as they pulled off their helmet and swung out their short hair. The shock of auburn against black leather was unmistakable. 

Alex Danvers. 

“The black sheep comes home,” Maggie muttered, turning back into the stables. 

~

The Danvers family had forged their fortune in the biomedical industry, creating medical products which revolutionised longterm treatment for conditions such as sight loss and spinal injuries. Alex Danvers had followed her father and mother into the field, but hadn’t yet taken control of the entire biomedical empire. 

That, however, was rumoured to be changing very soon. 

Over the course of the day, Maggie observed glimpses of Alex in the high windows, or when she came down to move her bike into the garage. She wore jeans, a shirt and a leather jacket, black boots dark against the light gravel driveway, not the typical cashmere uniforms of the rich and powerful. Nor was it the powersuits that Google Images displayed her in.

According to Maggie’s research, Alex had also been a favourite of the tabloids in her youth, but had hit a point where she disappeared from the paparazzi and the high society of National City altogether. Now, she shied away from tabloids, slaving away in the company’s public headquarters downtown. 

Leaning against the paddock’s fence, Maggie watched her emerge from the garage with her hands in her back pockets and turn her face towards the sun for a few minutes before returning to the house. 

Maggie fidgeted with the folded paper in her pocket, those four names. 

_ What do you know about them? _

Later, Alex joined Eliza and Kara on the rear patio for lunch. They interacted like normal family, if a little stiff. Maggie took the horses out just to catch a glimpse of them, managing to glean information from the gardener, Vasquez. 

“This is pretty unusual,” they said, carefully timing the statement between aggressive snips at the high evergreen hedges. 

“Is it?”

“Yeah.” They tipped back their sunhat, expression somewhat hidden by their sunglasses. “Alex doesn’t usually do surprise visits home. Not when she’s stuck into a project. She stays at her downtown penthouse.”

“She’s working on something big now?”

“I wouldn’t know, I just cut the hedges,” they replied, but smiled somewhat slyly, lowering the shears. “But this could get messy.”

“Messy?”

“Just you wait.”

Sure enough, by the time Maggie was leading Gertrude and Krypto towards the paddock, raised voices were carried down towards her from the patio. The distance warbled their meaning, but whatever the disagreement was about, it ended in Alex storming off. Kara stood, leaned over to say something to Eliza, and then followed her sister into the house. 

Maggie narrowed her eyes at the incident, letting herself linger on the dynamic, and then took the horses back to the stables. 

~

Blueprints littered the coffee table, coins from her pocket now being used as pawns. She had studied where the CCTV blind spots were, what time members of staff leave, when certain areas were unaccompanied. She learned people’s schedules, who clocked off before sundown, who worked late nights. 

She had looked for any areas that could be housing any building which was out of place. So far, she had identified three locations: the roof, the basement, and Annex A. Each in turn were prime candidates for untoward activities.

She sat back, tracing her route again and again. Annex A and the entrance to the basement were close, she could easily hit them both in a night. 

If there was anything here that linked the Danvers to the four dead aliens, the girl at the window, the girl with the plane, it would be there. 

And there was something else which had her attention ebbed to every few minutes. After a month of research prior to taking the position, her Youtube algorithm naturally provided more Danvers-related content, and she had spent this evening scrolling through a slurry of recent videos by financial market channels which were all dedicated to the company.

She had sipped at a beer, listening to stock experts hunch over their round tables, market data zipping around above their heads as they made happy noises. Discussed stakeholders. The upcoming  _ Danvers Bio-Solutions Expo _ at the National City Exhibition Centre.

Then something else had been suggested:  _ ‘Alex Danvers Gives Rare Lab Tour!’ _

It was a short video from a leading tech publication, a few years old, showing a version of Alex who was confident at science and shy of the camera. In an intricately cut sequence, she explained the latest developments in a project they were still laying the groundwork for, their findings shifting the company to focus on a neurological product. 

The most uncomfortable moment came when the correspondent conducting the interview asked whether Alex ever thought of her father’s work with the company. The scientist floundered, hands dug into her white lab coat, plastic googles seeming to mist… 

Maggie relaxed back onto the couch, letting her gaze roam aimlessly around the cabin. It had surprised her when she was given a tour on her first day. This was a self-contained house on the premises of the estate, two bedrooms, kitchen, bathroom, living room. She couldn’t help but think of the excess of the rich: how many families did she know that would die to have space like this? 

At a knock, she rose. While she was expecting company, everything had her on edge here. 

She opened her front door, relieved to see Winn clutching a backpack to his front. 

“Do you know how hard it was to get in here?” he complained, pushing past her into the cabin, “I thought the hounds were going to find me.”

As part of her scouting around the property, she had formulated a way for her friend to get in through a weak part in the fence, avoid the main security circuits, and reach her cabin undetected. 

“You avoided the floodlights?”

“Of course I did!”

“Good.” She peered once out into the darkness of the estate, and then closed the door. “And there are no hounds.”

He whistled, turning in a slow circle and taking in the cabin. “Broken in yet?”

“Trying to.” She smirked, tilting the bottle in her hand. “Beer?”

“No thanks. Want a crystal clear head.” He seated himself in front of the blueprints, pulling his backpack up onto the couch beside him. “You haven’t found anything outside?”

“Not outside, no.” She reached down and adjusted the three silver coins on the blueprint, then pointed them out individually. “Annex A. Basement. Roofspace. All prime candidates to check out.”

Winn hummed and thumbed at the three coins in turn. “The roofspace,” he said aloud, looking up in confusion. “Why there?”

Maggie sank into a crouch as he began to pull his devices from the backpack. He was here to try and see how far into the home’s network he could penetrate. The labs would be secured with state of the art defences to protect their data, but a home network would most likely be more vulnerable. Or so they hoped. 

He opened his laptop, plugging each of the ports with a different black device, and then handed her two plugs. She scoffed and went to find outlets, choosing her words carefully. 

“Couple nights ago, I saw someone from one of the windows about to jump out.”

Winn’s head flew up from behind his screen. “What?!”

“You heard me. But…” She perched beside him, lacing her fingers together. “You remember the girl who saved the plane, right?”

“Yeah…” He quirked his head. “She could fly…”

“Could be the same girl.”

“You think so?”

She shrugged. “Maybe.”

After a beat, he returned his attention to the laptop. His fingers danced rapidly across the keys, clicking through letters at a speed she couldn’t comprehend. The screen showed a simple black terminal, line after line of white code blinking faster than its preceding cursor. 

“There are rumours they’re going to announce a new CEO ahead of their Expo,” she said.

He didn’t look up. “What’s that got to do with four dead aliens?”

“New CEO. New project. New flying girl.” 

“You think they’ve been experimenting with aliens…” The tapping rhythm stopped. “And the dead ones are failed candidates…”

It was a very weak line of connection, with no real evidence, but it was the theory that had begun to form in her mind. The Danvers could be trying to make a replica of Superman, and had possibly succeeded with the girl who saved the plane. But with experimentation came failure, which could explain the bodies.

“Whatever breakthrough they’ve got, I think they’re going to announce it at the Expo.” She watched him for a few seconds as he adjusted the devices on the coffee table, then added, “And Alex Danvers has come home for a surprise visit.”

“Oh…” He drawled, hitting enter and sitting back to fold his arms over his chest. “What do we know about her?”

She watched lines of code appear, jumping further and further down the screen. She slid her phone across to his eyeline. He gasped.

“Oh, look at that adorable face!” he exclaimed, pulling her phone towards him and peering down at the paused face of Alex Danvers in the lab. 

“Could be a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

Any reply he had was interrupted by a sad series of bleeps, followed by Winn’s own sad noises of disappointment. 

“Soft nerve?” she asked, leaning towards his screen. She couldn’t understand the error code that had appeared, and knew virtually nothing about hacking computer systems, but she knew it couldn’t be good.

He blew out a breath and deflated back onto the couch. After a few seconds, he shot up and typed, hitting enter as if to expect a better result. But there was just another error. Then another. After the third, he gave up. 

“The system is vulnerable to a point,” he explained, “But...dammit, I don’t think we can get in.”

“Too hard to penetrate?” she queried.

“Easy enough but too risky. I’ll get caught.”

She had to trust his assessments. He lifted the laptop and set it onto the coffee table. He looked towards a window which she had already pulled the curtains over, as if he could see straight through into the dark grounds of the estate.

“This place is weird, Maggie,” Winn said, “I don’t like it.”

With the laptop shut and her phone screen paused, the only sound to answer him was the whistle of the wind down the fireplace. 

~

She hadn’t planned to spend her break with her feet up in the stable office, watching Youtube videos about the financial future of Danvers Bio-Solutions, but here she was. Krypto was sleeping, Gertrude was munching on hay, and Maggie was planning her next move. 

With Winn unable to hack into the systems, it seemed the only way for her to get any headway was to check out the three areas tonight. After the chef clocked out, she could use the kitchen doors to gain entry to the mansion. There was a CCTV blindspot, and from what she had studied of the security system the family were using, it was a weak point which some simple lockpicking would- 

Footsteps echoed into the stables. Maggie dropped her boots from the desk, locked her phone and peered from the doorway of the office. 

Wandering towards Gertrude’s section was Alex herself, donned in riding boots, breeches and a hunting coat. White gloves and a helmet swung from one hand as the other reached out to stroke along Gertrude’s nose. 

“I’ve missed you, hello,” Alex said, as the horse snorted and bumped into her touch, “Want to go for a ride? It’s a pretty great afternoon outside.”

Maggie viewed the interaction for a few seconds, comparing it to how Kara had greeted Krypto just the night before. Then she firmly closed the door to the office, signalling her arrival. “Good afternoon.”

Alex looked up, standing back from Gertrude as if she had been caught out. “Hello. You’re...” She looked Maggie up and down, strolling over. “The new stablehand. Mom said the position had been filled.” 

“I am.” Smiling, Maggie gestured at Alex’s attire. “Do you want me to get her ready for you?”

“No, I can do it.”

The dismissal caught Maggie mid-step. She couldn’t help the confused reply; “It’s literally my job description.”

At this, Alex looked her up and down again, this time with a smirk. She braced her helmet between her knees and started to pull on her gloves. “Let me guess, you’ve worked for some rich bratty kids before?”

Maggie thought of her fake references, drummed up by Winn’s photoshop and forgery skills. While Alex seemed amiable, Maggie was cautious on whether she should play it professional or not. It took the millionaire getting both the gloves and clipping her riding helmet before she chose to speak.

“You have no idea,” she said, leaning a shoulder against one of the tall wooden beams which held up the stables. “Some people treat animals as objects.” 

Alex rolled her eyes. “Like toys, not beings."

Like the pring of an electrical wire, Maggie grasped at her first impression of Alex Danvers. If she had a moral compass, an empathetic centre, then she couldn’t be involved in experimenting on alien beings. Couldn’t be involved in hurting them. Unless, of course, she was part of the crowd that didn’t believe aliens were beings worthy of having rights. 

Still, she wouldn’t know for sure until she broke into the lab. Maggie slipped her hands into her overall pockets, feeling the list of names. Years in this line of work had taught her a valuable lesson: 

Trust nothing until you’re certain. 

Alex almost had Gertrude ready to ride before either of them spoke again. Maggie handed her a saddle that she had retrieved: “Here you are, Miss Danvers.”

“Alex.”

“Alex.” Maggie ducked her chin. “Your sister goes by her first name too.”

Taking up the reins, she asked, “And you?”

“Maggie.”

“Just Maggie.” When she didn’t give a surname, Alex’s smirk returned. “Maggie S.”

Her heart dropped as irrational fears boomed into existence. Surely she hadn’t been recognised-

“S?” she squawked.

The smirk blossomed into a full on grin that Alex tossed over her shoulder as she led Gertrude into the sunshine. “For stablehand.”

Relief made Maggie weak in the knees. She watched Alex swing onto Gertrude’s back, and then returned to the office. Restlessly she poked around; while Alex had worn a navy hunting jacket, there were no hunting records, and no hounds on the estate. In a corner cupboard, whips which had never been used sat in their wrapper. 

But the real find was in a locked drawer that she jimmied open using stray wires from a metal yard brush rather worse for wear. She found nothing at all except a single photo frame with Eliza, another man, and two younger teenagers, which she suspected to be Alex and Kara. They weren’t in front of the estate: they were standing in front of what appeared to be a regular middle class house by the ocean.

Maggie leaned back in her chair, staring at those two teenagers, gears turning.

**_~_ **

Two birds argued in the bush, fluttering out and diving in. Maggie watched every movement, practicing her excuse under her breath. 

“Kara always brings Krypto carrots, I figured it was only fair Gertrude got some too,” she muttered, flexing her hands in and out of fists. 

The sun had set, the entire estate drenched in a milky blue dusk which was rapidly falling into nighttime. With the kitchen staff clocking off, she should have a clear path through the kitchen to her first target: Annex A. 

She slipped out from her hiding place in the bushes, disturbing the two birds from their routine and sending them croaking into the evening’s darkening sky. She crept along a gravel path, climbing two pale stone steps, and setting her sights for the door leading into the kitchen. 

“Carrots,” she mumbled, “For the horses, you know?”

Reaching the door, she drew close to the wood and paused, listening out. She could hear a faint rustle of the night’s breeze beginning to sift through the bushes and trees surrounding the back patio, the birds abandoning the place altogether. Apart from that, it seemed it was all clear. 

She opened the door and entered the kitchen. She hadn’t been in here before, but she had spied it on the blueprint and knew it would be spacious. It was dim, the only light flooding in from a corridor up ahead. She crept along the slate tiles towards where she knew would be the entrance to Annex A. Fingertips inched along the cool wall until she reached an arched entrance. She felt for a light switch. 

She inhaled fully, thinking of those four bodies. Four aliens. Four victims. Would she find the answers which would lead to justice?

She clicked on the light. 

What she found was a narrow, long room - as she spotted in the blueprint- added on as an extension to the kitchen. Stretching away from her on either side were shelves full of food. 

Annex A was just a pantry. 

An enlarged, extended pantry; but just a pantry nonetheless. 

She read labels of tins and packaging, thumbing over soups, snacks, and other sustenance. Either through defeat or the weight of surprise, she sank into a crouch in front of huge, industrial-sized bags of pasta and rice, mentally crossing off Annex A from the list. That left the basement and the roofspace. 

She palmed at the huge bag of rice, wondering why the family had this pantry stocked as if they expected a world disaster. Surely a family this rich wouldn’t have to plan or worry about food shortages? Or was there something else going on-

Boots clacked onto the kitchen slate. 

She sprang upwards, smashing her head against a shelf and sending her crashing back to the floor. Heavy bags of pasta and rice fell on top of her. Dizzied from the throbbing pain which erupted on her forehead, she didn’t have time to scramble up before a figure appeared in the doorway. 

“Maggie?”

The concerned tone belonged to Alex Danvers, who drank in the sight with a crumpled, confused stare. 

“Miss Danvers, I’m-” Maggie groaned, as she tried to rise to her elbows, the pantry spinning around her. She raised her hand to her head, feeling hot, sticky blood on her fingertips. 

“Is that-” Alex came closer, kneeling to lift away the bags of pasta and rice. “You’re bleeding.”

“I came in here to sneak some carrots for the horses and…” She dropped her hand, finishing quite lamely, “I hit my head.”

“Let me see…” Without warning, Alex gently tilted her chin up. She hummed as she examined the cut, then rose and held out her hand. Maggie eyed it for a second, prompting her to wave it in a loose circle. 

“Come on, get up,” she instructed, “I’ll stitch it for you.”

Maggie hesitated for a few seconds more, the panic of being caught completely washing away her prepared excuse for being in the kitchen in the first place. Still, Alex didn’t ask, so she didn’t elaborate on her alibi. 

She clasped Alex’s hand and accepted the help to her feet, wincing at the angry throb spreading from her forehead out to her temples. She allowed herself to be led to a grand, marble kitchen island and helped into one of the high chairs. Then Alex moved to turn on the kitchen lights, which had her wincing once more. 

Blood spattered across her fingertips, sliding wetly down over the bridge of her nose. Alex came over, concern in her eyes. 

“Doesn’t look too bad,” she murmured, leaning over the island.

“Can I trust you?” The question came out more bitter than she intended, so Maggie rushed to unload the air. “Since your patients are usually rats or pigs.”

Alex smiled. “I’ve patched up a few scrapes.”

With the adrenaline of being caught wearing off, the throb intensified, the blood itching on her skin. “Alright.”

Alex moved to a cupboard, swinging it open and retrieving a first aid kit. Maggie took the opportunity to take in the Danvers heir. She was in soft pyjamas, a rich burgundy colour, which Maggie was sure would cost three months rent. She also spied a half-full tumbler of amber liquid abandoned on the counter-side and wondered if Alex put it there before finding her in the pantry. 

She glanced over her shoulder and caught Maggie staring at her attire. She pulled the first aid kit to her chest, self conscious as she shuffled back over. “Please, ignore the...pyjamas.”

“Oh, they’re cute.”

Alex’s eyebrow flew up as she set the kit on the counter and opened it. Maggie bit the inside of her cheek. 

Of all the situations she had dreamed of tonight, all of the scenarios that could have gone wrong if she got caught, this seemed the most unreal. Sitting at a giant kitchen island, having multi-millionaire scientific innovator Alex Danvers cleaning the cut on her forehead.

“I’m not even supposed to be in here and I’m bleeding everywhere,” she said. 

“Don’t worry about it.” After gloving her hands, Alex climbed onto another chair and reached over with an antiseptic wipe.. “Try and focus on something else.”

While Alex’s touch was featherlite, she hissed through her teeth at the first searing touch of the wipe on the cut. Yet all too soon her focus was ensnared by a hint of shampoo. Peach, maybe, her stomach clenched. She bit her lip and searched wildly past Alex’s gloved hands for the first thing she could latch onto. 

In the light, the clean, marble kitchen drew awe, its surfaces glimmering. 

“Nice,” she said.

“It’s only recently been refitted,” Alex replied.

“Really?” Her eyes swivelled in her head as she tried to avoid seeing the pulse beating in Alex’s neck. “I thought old houses kept old taste.”

“My taste is more modern.”

_ Oh God _ , Maggie’s inner alarm bells screeched,  _ You’re attracted to her.  _

“Your kitchen staff don’t stay on at night?” she said, trying to keep her voice level.

“Nope. Unless there’s a dinner party.”

“Hence the extra large pantry.”

While Alex had been diligent in trying to clean the trails of blood off of Maggie’s forehead, she faltered in her careful swipes. “Yeah.”

The hesitation piqued Maggie’s interest, but rather than press it, she noticed a second door way along from Annex A- or the pantry as she now knew it. 

“Where does that lead?” she asked.

Alex leaned back, balling up the bloodied wipe and snapping off her gloves. “Downstairs, into the lab.”

The answer chipped off those smooth marble surfaces as Maggie’s heart squeezed in shock. By accident, she had uncovered a truth. A clue? 

“Lab? You’ve got a lab in this place?” she squeaked, artificially naive, “Sounds kind of like a James Bond bad guy hideout.”

Alex didn’t quite meet her eye as she grinned at the description. “Sometimes experiments are done that can’t really be shared with a whole lab team.”

She got up to dispose of the gloves and wipe, seemingly unaware that she had rendered Maggie speechless. She continued, “I actually just came up from there. Finished putting together a dataset on something which could be…” 

She clicked the first aid kit closed, returning it to the cupboard, then picked up the scotch. She considered Maggie, still sitting at the island, then raised her glass. 

“Did...you want to join me?” 

In an instant, she transformed from sending Maggie a warning sign to being a picture of a sad, lonely young woman. A part of her buried inside wanted to say yes. This was an attractive, rich, successful woman inviting her for a drink. But, within the context of her assignment, this was also her employer, and someone who could be responsible for four alien deaths. 

While she could see the genuine vulnerability in Alex’s face, Maggie needed time to go and access the revelation that, in fact, there was indeed a laboratory in the basement used for experiments which were not shared with other - more accountable- scientists. 

She slid down from the table, the kitchen spinning only slightly, “Maybe another time.”

She moved towards the entrance to the patio when Alex spoke again. 

“Oh hey-”

Maggie turned to see her holding out a bag of carrots, which she shook with a wide smile on her face. 

“For Gertrude.”

**_~_ **

_ “The time has come to stand down...This was always a stewardship position…” _

Angry, purple bruising, but otherwise harmless. Maggie tilted her forehead this way and that in the filter of morning sun coming into the bathroom, so close to the mirror she almost bumped it with her nose. She sighed and leaned back from the sink, staring into tired eyes. 

Between the taps, her phone blared out the daily breakfast politics programme from the radio. She habitually tuned in on her way to the office, and found that tuning in while she was undercover in this environment was a way to cling to her reality outside of it. 

As luck would have it, the financial and economics portion of the programme was focused on the breaking news of the morning. 

The CEO of  _ Danvers Bio-Solutions _ was stepping down. 

_ “Well Chris, after that, what do you think?” _

“Yeah Chris,” Maggie said, reaching for her toothbrush. “What do you think?”

As she brushed her teeth, she listened to the business and economics editor discussing Dr Hamilton’s tenure at the top of the company. She had been head of research under Jeremiah Danvers, and when he died suddenly in an accident, had assumed control of the company. 

It was strange, the experts drawled, that a scientist should be a CEO. Many stock analysts at the time expressed their dismay, saying they would have been more confident if the CFO Hank Henshaw had been promoted to the position. 

These stock brokers had also been rumouring of a change for a while, but no official word until today. 

The morning presenters thanked their editors, then moved onto a segment on whether technology-only portfolios were an eternal safebet or overrated. She lifted her phone, swiping through different radio shows, before switching it off completely. 

She showered, dressed, and marched along the path towards the stables. She noticed a commotion at the back of the house as two large grey vans pulled up and men started unloading camera equipment. 

Vasquez was weeding a flower bed by the paddock, and Maggie crouched beside them.

“What’s the TV crew here for?”

“They’re doing an interview with Alex,” Vasquez replied, smacking the dirt from their gloves. “New job, and all.”

“New job?” 

“You didn’t hear yet? It got announced just this morning.”

Suddenly, Maggie wondered if she should have kept on the politics programme after all. Maybe the bulletins following the portfolio discussion would have caught the breaking news and she wouldn’t have been so blindsided:

“She’s the company’s new CEO.”


	3. Chapter 3

In the three days since she split her head against the pantry shelf, Maggie hadn’t slept very well. She had followed the media storm like a small boat which was simultaneously exhausting her and keeping her awake. Once again, instead of sleeping, she found herself at the window, watching the moon crawl across the inky black sky. 

Her gaze slowly moved across the sky towards the house. 

She moved so close she bumped the tip of her nose against the pane, disbelieving of what she saw there. 

Above the house, there was someone hovering. 

Simply hovering in the air. 

Her breath fogged out against the window. ]The figure hung above the estate for a few seconds, then drifted around in an easy loop. They moved back again, then floated down to the roof, where they were hidden from Maggie’s view. 

She rubbed at her eyelids, waiting for the figure to reappear, but they didn’t. If Maggie hadn’t already had suspicions that experimentation on aliens was happening somewhere in the house, she would have thought it was a dream. 

Those three coins, those three locations. With Annex A ruled out, she had been plotting to get into the basement lab, but now her focus was switched right back to the roofspace.

She didn’t sleep after that, lying awake with her curtains drawn back, every flicker of the trees sending her up and over to the window in hopes she would see the figure again, but she didn’t. 

Finally, the sun rose and she dragged herself up into the kitchen. Her mind was so scrambled, she didn’t notice that her phone had a message from an unknown number until she had started on her coffee. She opened it, her stomach tightening at the simple request: 

_ Come to the kitchen when you wake up.  _

~

“I got your number from J’onn. I hope you don’t mind.”

When she hiked up the steps to the patio, she was greeted by Alex Danvers reclined on a deck chair soaking in the morning sun. She wore aviators, expensive slacks and a cashmere sweater: silently screaming money.

Maggie’s stomach again clenched as she acknowledged her attraction to the Danvers heir. She hadn’t seen her since the incident, and suddenly felt self conscious of her mucky boots and healing, yellow bruise. 

Alex turned her attention from the sun to Maggie, pulling her aviators down. “You don’t mind, do you?”

“No but…” Maggie slipped her hands into the back pockets of the old work jeans she wore. “I’m a little underdressed if there’s a TV crew around here.”

This drew a snort from Alex, who kicked up from her deck chair. “No, no crew. Not today.” Maggie watched wordlessly as she took off her aviators and folded them into her collar. “I wanted to show you what’s beyond the basement door.”

She blinked. “What?”

Alex held the door into the kitchen, nodding her through. “I know you’re curious.”

“I’m also just the stablehand.” Maggie didn’t step forward, waving at her boots, then gesturing to the clean slate kitchen tiles. “You don’t want me to work?”

“Gertrude’s a big girl. She can do without you for an hour.”

Maggie chewed her lip. She thought of the girl over the house, of pressing against the window for a better view. Would she get answers?

Alex cocked her chin, and Maggie followed her inside. The business of post-breakfast rituals was apparently in full swing. The chef barked instructions at her kitchen assistant between clinking dishes. 

The pair paid them no mind as Alex moved towards the basement door. Even with all of the questions buzzing in her mind, she felt her feet grow cold. “If you’re stuck on a project, I’m not sure I can help…”

Alex pushed on, going through the door and beginning to descend a steep set of stairs. Maggie glanced back once at the chef and assistant, and then followed. 

The chill she expected descending into the basement wasn’t there. Instead, the space was pleasantly heated, and tastefully lit too: she reached a short corridor which doubled as a wine cellar. The underfoot lighting caught Alex’s playful smile as she hovered near another closed doorway.

“The things I’m about to show you…” she said, excitement trembling in her voice. “You really should be signing an NDA for.”

Underneath the estate, the two of them close in the corridor, the shadow playing across Alex’s features, Maggie couldn’t help but feel it was uncomfortably intimate. She eased back, pretending to eye the wine selection on either side of her. She saw some aged scotch, too expensive for her own tastes. 

“So why are you showing me?” she asked. 

“Because…” Alex paused, wringing her hands together. “I’ve got my first Expo as CEO, and what I’ve been working on...I’m nervous about showing it to the public. Announcing it to the world.”

_ Afraid of the reaction to moral and ethical blackspots? _

She swallowed her real question down. “Afraid it won’t live up to expectation?”

“Sort of,” Alex admitted. 

“You need an impartial audience to react to it?”

“Exactly.” 

Maggie nodded, her stomach knotted at the thought of what lay beyond the lab door. “Alright.” 

The facilities at the  _ Danvers Bio-Solutions _ labs in downtown National City and elsewhere were impressive, state of the art hubs. But this was something special. Maggie’s jaw dropped as she entered a basement like no other she had seen. 

The room stretched in front of them, far enough that Maggie was sure it ran underneath the estate’s back gardens. In front of her were a row of terminals, all flatscreens, and behind her was a long, stainless steel work bench. Along the back wall were blacked out cupboards, some of them humming, no doubt temperature controlled. 

There was so much above, around and beyond her, that she could hardly take it all in. 

“It’s like NASA in here,” she said. 

“I’ll leave the rockets to Lord Tech.”

Alex paced over towards a space in the wall of what looked like upgraded lockers. She pressed her hand against an illuminated pad, and after a few seconds it bleeped happily. Pressurized air puffed out and she retrieved an object from inside one of the boxes.

Maggie followed curiously as she brought it to a nearby bench. It looked like a bicycle helmet, with a sleek black design and lighter material. Alex played with dials on the top until a monitor lit up. She typed at it, and then abandoned it to move to a terminal at the front. All of a sudden, the wall in front of them lit up, and Maggie realised that it was in fact one large computer screen. 

“See,” she said, folding her arms over her chest, “NASA.”

Alex chuckled, but said nothing, before returning to the helmet. “This is it.”

Maggie looked down. “This is what?”

“My secret basement project.” Alex waved a hand. 

Maggie read silver typeface on the side. “Re...n...Renu-Tia?”

“No hard T.” Alex stressed the name: “Like  _ renew-shia _ . Renutia.”

She eyed it closely. “What does it do?”

“We’re going to demonstrate that but first-” Alex backpedalled towards the terminal, leafing through a nearby folder and then returning. She unpegged a pen from the top of the folder and then slid both it and the documents inside towards Maggie. “You need to sign a safety disclaimer.”

With a furrowed brow, Maggie took the pen. “Is this going to melt my brain?”

“Maybe,” Alex said, gently tapping the side of the helmet.

Maggie bit her lip and looked down at the page. She didn’t like that she was once again torn between her gut instincts and her need for answers. From Alex’s eager body language, she didn’t have a lot of time to digest the legalities. She had to take the plunge. 

She bent to sign her name and date as Alex asked, “Do you know anyone who’s been affected by dementia or Alzheimers?”

“No.”

“Well, the problem with Alzheimers is the brain doesn’t retain recent memories. This is supposed to help cement that.”

She backed away towards the terminal, and Maggie, for lack of anything else to do, followed. 

“We’re going to do a simple test,” Alex said, typing at the terminal. Onscreen, a program booted up and coloured graphics whirled. “ I’ll show you ten words, ten numbers and ten colours in a random order. Then, you try and recall them as well as you can.”

“Then you put this on-” She pointed back at the helmet. “And we’ll try it again.”

“Okay…”

She looked up with a small smile, nothing more than a quirk of her lip, and Maggie’s heart began to race. 

“Ready?”

“Sure.”

Maggie stepped back, both to quell the pounding of blood in her ears and to concentrate on the task, rather than the gorgeous scientist. Alex hit a button, and the programme counted down from ten. Then, she watched and tried to remember as much as she could, but the pace was two a second and she struggled. The rhythm was a steady beat, the images whizzing by her before she could really register them. 

Then it was over. 

Alex hitched her hip against the bench. “So?”

“Uh…” Maggie blinked. “Twenty four...orange? Uh...then…” She held up her hands. Empty. 

Unsurprised, Alex thumbed towards the helmet. “Now put it on.”

Maggie picked it up, the power of it like a weapon. She cautiously settled it on her head, surprised at the fit. The rim of it grazed the tips of her ears, and she was grateful that it wasn’t so heavy as to strain her neck. 

“This will be completely randomised again, so nothing from before, okay?”

She laced her fingers tight together in her lap, a bolt of anxiety keeping her ramrod stiff. She thought of those four aliens. “This is safe, right?”

“What-?” Alex spun, offended. “Of course it is!”

“Alright.” Maggie grinned, more a flash of her teeth than sincere. “Just making sure.”

This time, the task was so much clearer. As the test began, it was as if her brain was taking snaps of every single letter, number, figure that appeared. Her mind was on autopilot, even as her body went into shock, eyes darting around the screen. It was so charged, that she began her recitation even before the test properly finished.

“Screwdriver. Red. Thirty-five-”

“Alright-”

“Picket. Green. Seventy-six-” She slapped a hand over her mouth to stop anything further. 

Bemused, Alex leaned back again. “You want to go on?”

“I-” Maggie shook her head in disbelief. 

“But you could, right?”

Another click of the terminal keyboard, and the correct order of the test appeared. Maggie knew it all. Every number, colour, letter. Random words with disjointed meanings, no connections. 

At the gravity of the situation, Maggie took the helmet off and felt the weight of it in her hands. How had this been conceived? How had it been trialled and tested?

“I could have done with this in college.” She studied the helmet’s black design in the lab’s harsh light. Whatever material it was made from seemed to absorb the light; both sleek and reflective at once. “Wow.”

Obviously pleased with her reaction, Alex played it cool and simply shrugged a shoulder. 

“It’s a prototype. And it won’t solve the bigger problem of genetics…” She lifted the helmet from Maggie’s grasp and made towards the lockers. “But it’s a start on short-term treatment.”

“But it could be developed into a cure?”

“Treatment. Then maybe cure.” Alex placed the helmet carefully back in the locker and clicked it shut. “Have patients coming in two, three times a week. It’s mobile, so maybe physicians could take it out to patients. We can use it to detect those early signs of brain degeneration earlier, for those who are high risk.”

The computer chirped and a scanner behind the terminal began to spit out a page of paper. Alex pinched it and then handed it to Maggie. “Here’s your post-test scan.”

“My brain?”

Even over the edge of the page, Maggie could see how science absorbed every aspect of Alex, exciting her until her very aura shimmered. It was as if she was hooked up to an electric current. 

“Your memory will be pretty fantastic for the next few days.” 

And as if she was ready to perform a demonstration, Alex turned and surfed through her terminal interface, pulling up a folder, and then typing in a passcode to unlock encrypted files: all under Maggie’s watchful eye. With the enhanced perception of memory, Maggie easily jogged through each of the steps over and over, while Alex tended to something in a document. 

Because in that file, there was a folder named  _ ‘Candidate - FollowUps’ _ , and if Maggie wanted answers to why the four alien victims had this house’s address on their persons, that could be where she needed to start. 

As Alex pulled her mobile from her pocket and thumbed a message, Maggie took the opportunity to drink in the lab in more detail. To her right, beside the door leading back to the kitchen, was an enormous, vault-like round seal. 

“What’s behind that?” she asked.

Alex looked up, and laughed as if she was eager to change the subject. “I want to keep some secrets, Maggie.” She made towards the exit. “Come on. I texted Yvonne to make us coffee.”

Maggie glanced at her watch, aware of the tasks which still lay ahead. “I should be getting back-”

“You’ve got time,” Alex said, dismissing her concerns. 

On her way past, Maggie got a good lingering examination of the vault-like door. It was at least eight feet in diameter, solid steel, with an orange sign warning of bio-hazardous material beyond. Underneath was a neon yellow sign with a nuclear symbol on it, and finally, adjacent was a touchpad, likely the way in. 

They went blinking out into the daylight, and sat at a table on the patio overlooking the gardens. Maggie hadn’t been one hundred percent sure why Alex would ask the stablehand to test a product, even with the answer of an impartial audience, but in the afternoon sunshine she finally understood. 

Alex, scientific, rich, powerful, intelligent, was lonely. Trying to step into the role of a CEO, taking charge of an international company, but isolated from the real world. 

“Oh, before I forget,” Alex said, as Yvonne glided towards them with a tray stacked with coffee and fruit. “You don’t have to sneak your boyfriend onto the premises. We can give him an ID pass.”

Maggie’s heart seized. Had Winn been caught? Panic forced out the first thing in her head: “He’s not my boyfriend.”

Alex raised an eyebrow as Yvonne neatly unloaded the tray in front of them. “No?”

“Just a friend.” Maggie nodded her thanks as coffee was placed down before her. “I’m not actually into guys.”

“Oh.” The eyebrow raised higher, followed by a higher pitched: “ _ Oh! _ ”

Clearly looking to escape the conversation’s drive into a ditch, Yvonne awkwardly interjected. “Anything else?”

A deer in headlights, Alex’s wide eyes swung to the chef, then to Maggie, then to the empty tray, finally falling into her black coffee.

“No, thank you. That’s all.”

It was an eternity of staring at a fixed point in the gardens below before Yvonne was sufficiently out of earshot. Alex played with the handle of her cup. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to...” 

“It’s fine. And I’m single so...”

Maggie wasn’t a stranger to people tripping over her sexuality. God knows, her parents hadn’t dealt with it. But she chose this as a perfect moment to turn the discomfort around and see past another of Alex’s walls. 

“And you?” 

Alex choked on a sip of coffee. “No I don’t- that’s not-” She sucked in a full lungful of air, her cup clattering back to the table. “I’m not into girls.”

Maggie stifled her bemusement. “I mean are you seeing anyone? I can’t imagine you get much time for dating as the new CEO.”

Her shoulders deflated in relief. “It’s a lot of pressure. But no matter what people say, I’m the only person to fit in that role.”

Interested, Maggie leaned forward on her elbows. “Why do you say that?”

“There are people who don’t want me to be CEO. But this company has always been about this family. So I am.”

The loneliness, the pressure, it was plain to see in Alex’s face; Maggie felt at once on guard and sinking into her, torn between suspicion and trust. And, of course, something much more. 

“You’re young for a CEO. Are you even 30?”

“29.”

In her research between horse-riding lessons before this role, Maggie had stumbled upon old tabloid articles of Alex. She knew there was a period in her life where she had taken to the rich socialite style well, partying hard around the world. Until, apparently, she fell overboard at a yacht party. 

While she survived drowning, she was never seen in the tabloids in the same way again. 

Maggie almost considered asking her about that incident out of curiosity, but Alex caught a glimpse of her wristwatch and downed the rest of her coffee.

“Shoot. I have a Zoom call with the board of directors in twenty. I should get ready.”

“I should get back to the stables.”

As they both stood from the table, Maggie noticed Kara walking with another man through the gardens. They both adjusted their glasses, sharing a laugh.

“Who’s that?” Maggie asked. 

“Clark Kent is here for a visit. He got in pretty late last night.”

But Maggie was a light sleeper. 

And she didn’t remember hearing any vehicles. 

~

As soon as she got back to the cabin, she recalled the order in which Alex had browsed her registry and clicked through folders, as well as the passcode she typed on the computer in order to decrypt the files. She wrote them down on a piece of paper and tucked it in the first drawer of the nightstand. 

For the second night in a row, a figure circled around the house. This time, Maggie caught the entire circuit, the navy shadow moving as if through water against the blue night. 

After a few minutes, a second figure joined, and in the lights of the estate house caught a crimson cape and boots.

“Superman,” she whispered. 

~

The morning air was thankfully not as dry as it could have been, so far from the ocean. Vasquez had the sprinklers timed to come on just before sunrise, and Maggie enjoyed their misty arcs as she laced up her sneakers.

She could have been more disciplined at her running schedule, but running at dawn when she had a bad sleep wasn’t the most appealing to her. Still, this morning she was determined to get a good look at the roofspace before any activity around the estate kickstarted. 

She hopped, stretched, and then headed through the garden paths towards the front of the estate. The gravel wasn’t very pleasant to run on, so that by the time she reached the large round fountain, she had to stop and stretch again. 

She stared up at where the building met the sky, the pale blue of dawn giving away no secrets. She could imagine it pitch black, with shafts of the floodlights, and those floating figures…

Could there be other clues up there? And what was behind the vaulted door in the basement?

“What are you looking at?”

Caught off guard by the presence of Alex, Maggie’s foot slipped from the fountain and crashed into the gravel. She regained her posture, looking to see the other woman bending from leg to leg in shorts and a Stanford T-shirt. 

“You’re out running this early?”

“Yeah.” Alex looked her up and down. “You too.”

Maggie propped her hands on her hips. “Since the rumour about your super secret basement lab is true, I’m wondering what other secrets you could be hiding.”

Alex sniffed, hiding a smile as she looked bashfully at her shoelaces. “Well, it’s a little early for a treasure hunt.”

Running the toe of her shoe over the gavel, Maggie pushed just a little. “The helmet isn’t the only thing you’re working on, surely?”

“All major companies like ours have a bunch of research projects going on at once.”

Alex chose this moment to begin jogging off, but Maggie wouldn’t let her get away so easy. “So, there are secrets!” She called, “Anymore here?”

Slowing with a huffing laugh, Alex turned with an indignant expression, then knelt to adjust her shoelaces. “There are some experiments you have to conduct away from eyes that can be bribed.”

Again, the pendulum swung between suspicion and trust. “That’s not really commonplace with other companies though. And they all worry about intellectual property theft, Miss Danvers.”

Alex peeked up, but rather than clarify, provided an equally mysterious answer. “It isn’t what we experiment with, it’s who we experiment on, what needs to be kept secret.”

It was like a wash of cold ice, the mirth draining from Maggie. 

Alex stood, beaming. “Gotta run.”

She turned and jogged off, this time without a chaser. Her voice banged around Maggie’s skull long after she had been lost from sight behind an evergreen hedge.

_ Who we experiment on. _

~

Maggie sipped at her scotch, staring at the little green icon on her Skype. Any second now, the call would come through. For now, she lounged on the couch, reviewing the day in her mind. She was weary, the job of looking after horses leaving her bone-heavy. Yet her mind was alive, spiralling from hour to hour through the day since Alex had shown her the helmet. 

With all of the new revelations etched into her brain, none of her original questions answered and yet having a million more, she hadn’t taken the time to really process the emotion of it all. 

But she didn’t have time now, either, as Skype sang to her from the coffee table. She stretched out an arm, lazily swivelled the touchpad, and clicked accept. 

Onscreen, Winn spun in his computer chair.  _ “Howdy.” _

“You’re sure the line is fully secure?” she asked, sitting up. 

_ “What, you don’t trust me?” _ He rolled his eyes.  _ “It’s secure.” _

She planted her socked feet on the ground. “You look tired.”

_ “CatCo WorldWide Media. Treating its employees like hamsters in their wheels.” _

“When will you quit that job?”

_ “When you can afford to have me as your grey hat assistant.” _

She made a noncommittal noise, sipping from her tumbler.

_ “So I have this….” _ He held up a square attached to a cable. She leaned closer, making out an external harddrive.  _ “...Which may or may not be the medical examiner’s reports.” _

She put down the glass to avoid shattering it. “Winn.”

_ “As well as the correspondence between the DA, the NCPD Commissioner and the Mayor’s office raising the alarm that alien weaponry was in use in National City.” _

“Winn.”

_ “And that federal authorities should be alerted.” _

“Stop talking.”

He put it down out of sight again, running a hand through his hair.  _ “So yeah, it’s a secure line. _ ”

She leaned back, palming the back of her neck. “What kind of weaponry?”

_ “All of the victims had their brains scrambled.”  _

The helmet. The memory test. She shook her head, trying to clear the rapid-fire memories. The previous afternoon was still playing with her cerebral wellbeing. 

If it was a cerebral haemorrhage or similar cause of death, it would make sense that there were very few if any external trauma on the victim’s bodies. No gun or knife wounds, no blunt force trauma, no strangulation. Yet given the four victims had been kidnapped prior to their deaths, all of them having the same cause of death couldn’t be coincidence and betrayed something sinister. 

“What do you mean, scrambled?”

_ “I’m a computer guy, not a science guy, Maggie. I don’t know.” _

Blowing out a breath, Maggie drank heartily from her tumbler, savouring the burn. Could those aliens have been involved in the trials for the helmet? But if that were the case, how could have it been made safe for human use so soon after their deaths? That is, if she was assuming they died because something experimental went wrong. 

In which case… 

She froze. Alex had said the helmet was ready for the Expo, hadn’t she? Or was Maggie...a human guinea pig, too?

She set down her tumbler, gripping the front of her scalp. No, she hadn’t healthily processed the emotions yet. Because this was ridiculous. Paranoid. 

_ “You okay slugger?” _ Winn prompted, concerned on her laptop screen. _ “Any updates with you?” _

How would she even begin to explain what happened in the basement? With the effects of the helmet still swirling in her brain, it felt like a fever dream. Something she needed a proper sleep to rid her system of completely. She decided to go another route. 

“Clark Kent was here.” 

_ “Clark Kent?” _ he parroted, swinging mindlessly in his computer chair.  _ “Doing a piece on the new CEO?” _

“I thought so...” She minimised the chat window, searching the Daily Planet website. She checked for an article, even an indication that something was coming from him, but his column online was still empty. Perhaps it was a longer piece, and would take more time. As she closed the website, she could remember whole blocks of the text in articles. 

“But nothing yet,” she finally said. She took a deep breath, and took the plunge. “But I can confirm the Danvers have a secret lab under their home.”

He sat up so quickly, she heard the spring  _ thunk _ in the bottom of the chair. _ “What, really? Did you get in?” _

She nodded, lacing her fingers together. “And more. I got to see their new project.”

_ “Woah, woah woah, lady.” _ He danced his palms as if washing an invisible window.  _ “You gotta give me more than that.” _

She explained the invitation, what she saw in the basement, and the test they performed. With every detail, Winn seemed to lean closer and closer to his laptop.

_ “Damn,” _ he sang,  _ “And you haven’t gotten up to the roof yet?” _

“No. That’s the plan though-”

Someone knocked at the door. She slammed the laptop lid down, feeling like she had jumped to the ceiling. She grabbed her phone, shot off a quick sorry text, and made it to the door just as the person knocked a second time. 

She slipped her phone into her back pocket and opened up, a familiar figure darkening the doorway. 

“Alex.” She cursed the thumping blood in her ears, her voice high in her throat. “Hey.”

“Hi.” Alex glanced past her into the cabin. “Can I come in?”

“Sure.” Given that Alex owned every last beam of wood which held this place together, Maggie wasn’t really sure she could refuse. She stood to the side and let the other woman enter. “You okay?”

“Went on a walk to clear my head.” She turned, hands buried in the pockets of her jacket.“I’m wondering if you’re still up for that drink?”

The pantry. The Carrots. The offer. “Sure.”

She lifted her tumbler on the way past the coffee table, and then swanned into the kitchen, trying to get her nerves under control. Had Alex heard anything as she stood outside?

“Scotch good?” she called.

“Scotch great.” 

Maggie poured the two glasses, but wished she hadn’t already had a two drink disadvantage. She began to feel that horrible half-way state between panic and relaxed, the nauseating one which could only come after alcohol had been consumed; where the world was too foggy for her activated fight or flight to properly navigate. 

Alex smiled as she entered and took her glass, their fingertips brushing. For a scientist who spent her days around chemicals, Maggie couldn’t help but notice her fingertips were soft. 

“Take a seat,” Maggie said. As Alex lowered herself to the couch, she chose the safer spot of the adjacent armchair. 

Alex sipped the scotch, hummed in approval, then gestured to the television. “Do you mind if we put the news on?”

Maggie handed over the remote. “Something happening?”

“Kara texted me and said put it on.”

On screen was a journalist and two guests discussing a piece called:  _ ‘Lex Luthor’s mother speaks on alien violence’.  _ They featured a quote from a recent interview, in which she said alien violence was a threat to human life, and that decisive action needed to be taken. The anchor then featured a series of tweets and social media posts in which anti-alien groups rallied behind the statements. 

“She’s pressing hard on that wound,” Alex murmured, “Getting people to blame their poverty and lack of support on aliens, instead of their incompetent authorities.”

“What do you know about poverty?” Maggie asked, “You’re wearing a Ferster’s watch.”

The turnaround was sharp. So much so, that she felt the inside of her mouth both cut and numb, surprised at her own bitterness. 

Alex seemed surprised too, retracting her wrist into her jacket to hide the luxury watch. “We got rich. We weren’t born rich. There’s a difference.”

“You weren’t born poor.”

Alex focused on the screen as a short clip of Lillian Luthor herself appeared, not rising to the bait. Maggie sipped her scotch, studying the sharp profile, wondering what her views on aliens were. 

She decided to cut through the fog and ask. “What do you think about her views on aliens?”

Alex’s jaw clenched. Stormy eyed, she stared down into her alcohol. “They’re dangerous.” 

“Aliens are? Or-?”

“Her views are dangerous.” Alex’s clarification was cool and hard, steely. “They’re  _ people _ .”

“Not specimens to be poked and prodded?”

Again, Maggie cursed that she was two drinks ahead of Alex, the loose tongue giving away an aggressive and agitated direction to the conversation. In response, it seemed that she was pressing on a wound, as Alex seemed to pale. 

Her glass clinked hard on the table, as if to mount a defensive, but Maggie slipped a confession to defuse the moment, “You really confuse me, you know that?”

Alex blinked. “Why?”

“You have the money to be anywhere you want.” She reached out, grabbing Alex’s wrist and pulling the watch from under her sleeve. She kept her grip weak, so that Alex could pull away at any time, but she was entranced. “Do anything, eat anything, sleep with anyone. But you’re in the cabin of your stablehand, watching cable news.”

Alex’s lips parted as she whispered, “I…”

A harsh buzzing emanated from the couch. Alex pulled away from Maggie’s grip, pulling out her mobile to see who was calling.

“Shit, I have to go.” She got up and shot towards the door. “Thanks for the drink.”

Watching Alex leave, Maggie retrieved the list of four names from her pocket. She stared at it, trying to remember her purpose. To uncover what the Danvers were doing at their estate, and whether it caused those deaths. So far, there was nothing.

So far. 

She crumpled the list and threw it away. 

And in the morning, she wrote it fresh. 


	4. Chapter 4

The coffee shop was bustling for a Sunday, but it wasn’t hard to pick out Winn’s booth. While many tables had students and young professionals working at laptops, his booth contained half of an office-worth of interconnected devices.

Approaching at a swagger, she didn’t stop the grin spreading across her face at the sight of him tapping at one laptop while reading information on another tablet screen.

“I still don’t know how you get away with this,” she said, following the leads snaking off to outlets under the table. 

“Because they’ve watched Mr Robot and think I’m about to blackmail them with their internet history,” he replied, reaching out with two fingertip to zoom in on something on the tablet. 

“They aren’t wrong.” She slid into the booth opposite him as he slid a steaming cup towards her. She had this negotiation down to a fine art; she peered over the rim. “Black?”

“Black,” he confirmed.

“Extra shot?”

His head finally rose from his technology. “No, it’s the afternoon!”

“Damn,” Maggie mumbled, lifting the cup to her lips. She took a sip, then scanned around the busy booths. “James is late?”

A voice from behind her answered. “Nope, just at the bathroom.” James lifted his camera from the seat, putting it on the table and sliding in alongside Winn. “What’s the latest?”

The computer tech wiggled his eyebrows. “Yeah, how’s it going at the Scooby Doo mansion?”

Maggie snickered, gazing out of the wide window into the sunshine. There was a trio of teenagers loitering on the steps of the bank across the road, bobbing their heads to a song one of them played aloud on their phone. All along the street, people went to and fro, nowhere in a hurry on a Sunday. 

“The basement holds a whole lab,” She said.

“The basement what?” James gawped. 

“Yup.” She sat back, taking a sip of her coffee. 

Winn scratched at his temple, uncomprehending. “Have you seen any aliens going in and out?”

“Not really.” But even as she said it, she could picture the girl hovering above the estate. “But-”

An almighty boom thundered around the diner, rattling pots and crockery. They jumped out of their skin, cutting her off entirely. Glasses smashed to the floor, people screamed, chairs scraped the ground as patrons leapt to their feet. 

“Holy-!”

The entire window was obscured by a cloud of white dust. 

“Bomb!” a woman gasped in the booth behind them. 

“Oh God,” someone else cried, “Someone’s bombed the bank.”

Winn’s hands clutched at the sides of his laptop where they had automatically jerked to. James was mid-way between sitting and standing, and when he met Maggie’s eye, he grabbed his camera bag and headed for the exit. Hot on his heels, Maggie weaved through the gobsmacked patrons, many frozen in shock and staring at the clouded window. 

The sunlight which had washed the street was now completely dulled. Outside was chaos, people coughing and spluttering as they scurried about, dust in their eyes, whitening their hair and clothing. Horns honked, footsteps pounded, and the bank’s alarm rang into the confusion. 

Maggie and James ducked through the fray, squinting through the dust, running straight for the bank. 

They managed to stop at the bottom of the steps, staring up as activity cleared the cloud and everything settled. Sitting down, tied together, were four men on the top step. Behind them, a woman stood with a balaclava on and her hands on her hips. 

Footsteps scuffled behind them, and a woman covering her mouth with a scarf appeared at Maggie’s elbow.

“I’m a doctor,” she called. “How many are hurt?”

“Some are in shock around the back,” the balaclava-clad woman replied. The doctor quirked her head, puzzled, and the woman at the top of the steps continued: “I got everyone out, but I didn’t have time to stop the explosion. The damage looks worse than it is.”

The announcement stunned the panic out of them. 

“And who are they?” Winn asked, pointing at the men tied up.

“Call the cops, those are the men who did this.”

James lifted his camera and snapped, capturing the woman’s attention. She focused on Maggie for the first time, and straightened at the sight of her. She seemed to try and speak, but thought better of it, and shot off into the sky. 

“Wow,” Winn said, watching the woman fly away.

The citizens who had been running away from the explosion stood as the dust settled, staring in awe into the sky. The teens who had been loitering on the steps joined them at the steps of the bank, staring at the four men tied up. 

“That was crazy,” one of them said, the music still blaring from their phone.

_ Yeah, it was,  _ Maggie thought. 

~

The news crews arrived before the emergency services, both groups scrambling to grab the stunned bystanders before the other could whisk them away. Maggie and Winn sat on a bench outside the coffee shop, with James hovering beside them, clicking through his camera. Every so often he lifted his head and raised the camera, snapping once or twice, before going back to his inspection. 

He went still, then thrust the camera down to his companions. Maggie studied at the small LED screen, seeing the moment that the girl froze up before taking off into the sky. In the picture, Maggie could see the outline of her own figure, blurred in the foreground. 

“She recognised you, Maggie,” James said. 

Winn agreed, eagerly leaning closer. “She did!”

A girl hovering above an estate, deep into the night… 

Maggie entertained the line of thought. “If it’s an alien girl, it could be someone from the community, or...” She faltered, unsure of where she was going, but Winn picked up where she left off. 

“Or…” He lowered his voice, glancing around at the cops, paramedics and journalists buzzing around, “It could be the girl from the estate!”

But how would that girl have recognised her? Maggie had never seen her up close or in person, just when she stared out of her bedroom window at night. 

She took the camera from James’ outstretched hand and peered closer, even zooming in to see the eyes through the cheap mask. Even if she did recognise Maggie, what was she trying to communicate in her stare? Asking for help? No, she seemed too relaxed and triumphant at capturing the robbers. 

Nothing added up. In defeat, she shoved the camera back in James’ direction and slumped against the bench. While there could be a link between the trials for the helmet and the alien victims, there was still no connection with the separate project of the girl who could fly. 

“You think it’s something to do with the Danvers,” Winn said, pointing straight at her nose.

“What, no!”

His eyes bugged. “Could they be building supersoldiers?”

“Look.” She stood up, not ready to dive back into theorising what other projects the Danvers were up to. “As crazy as that was, we still got work to do.”

She stretched her arms above her head, and then wiped stray white dust from the shoulders of her leather jacket. To their right was a cluster of broadcast journalists, writing and practising the pieces they would deliver on the evening news. To the left, police were taking statements from the teenagers. Just beyond them, an abandoned getaway car stood like a monument for what had occurred. 

“It was a miracle no one was hurt…” a journalist said, then repeated in a different tone, then threw her arms up in frustration, “What do you think, Charlie? More stern? Less empathetic?”

James clicked his camera off and secured it back into its bag. Winn stood, lugging his backpack and laptop bag onto his shoulders. They had a mission to scout the National City exhibition centre, where the  _ Danvers Bio-Solutions _ annual Expo would be held. Traditionally, it was where the company wooed both investors and the public, letting them in on both ongoing and upcoming projects which would- they claimed - take the medical and technological worlds by storm. 

While they were off doing that, Maggie had her own aim for the afternoon. 

“Off to the exhibition centre,” James said, grinning at his companion, “Sure you can handle that stuff?” 

Winn waddled past the journalists, grumbling all the way. 

~

She double and triple checked the address she had scrawled on a piece of paper, making sure she had the correct apartment number before knocking. The area was one she knew well, having been involved with many in the alien community over the years. It was a neighbourhood known to be safe for off-worlders to settle into, and it was unfortunate circumstances which brought her to this particular door. 

It squeaked open, a timid pair of eyes appearing in the small gap. 

“Mrs Ganez?” Maggie started, “I’m Maggie Sawyer. I’m a private investigator.”

The eyes blinked. They were free of suspicion, but flickered with uncertainty. “I don’t want any trouble,” a voice quietly insisted.

“I’m not here for trouble. I’m looking into recent deaths.”

The person didn’t reply, and the door didn’t waver. Maggie tried to make her body language as open and honest as she could, empathising with the fear the other person felt. 

“I’m here to talk to you about your daughter.” She paused, waiting for a reaction, and when none came, she continued, “I investigate alien deaths.”

One second, then two. She could hear footsteps in the corridor upstairs, traffic whooshing on the road outside, music playing in an apartment a few doors down. Finally, her voice thick with emotion, the woman on the other side said, “The police don’t care.”

Her heart constricted at the grief this woman had been burdened with; not only the loss itself, but also for others to discard her daughter’s death like it was meaningless. 

“I do,” she said.

At this, the door finally opened, and Maggie said the woman’s pained, teary expression. She waved her over the threshold and quickly shut them in.

Sitting in a plain living room, Maggie noticed some runes and other knick knacks which were clearly alien. But other than that, both the woman in front of her, the pictures in their frames, and the interior make up of the room was human-passing. 

They began with the basics. What happened the night Mrs Ganez’s daughter didn’t come home. How she found out about the death. How the police had handled - or mishandled - the investigation. 

Then Maggie got to her own questions, which were broadly similar to those she had asked the previous three grieving families before she found the lead into the Danvers estate. 

“Mrs Ganez, what do you know about Danvers Bio-Solutions?” she inquired.

Up until now, the woman had been slumped in an armchair. The pair had sat down without any offer of hospitality. But at this she seemed hit by lightning, straightening up and palming at her knees. 

“Oh! My Chantelle was involved in a special trial!” she exclaimed.

“A-a-” Maggie cleared her throat. “A special trial?”

“Yes, let me just-” 

Mrs Ganez got up and shuffled away into another room without warning. Maggie could hear ruffling and shuffling, drawers being slammed and the squeak of bed springs. Then she returned, laden with a stack of files which she deposited on the coffee table in front of Maggie. 

“May I?” At Mrs Ganez’s approval, Maggie reached forward and began to leaf through the information. The header of each page had a code which she assumed was a candidate number. A summary held various pieces of information about Chantelle Ganez, like how her father was a species of alien with psychic abilities. Then there were multiple consent forms, signed off by Alex Danvers herself. 

Maggie thumbed at the swishy signature, thinking of the woman who had been so eager to share her new toy.  _ Renutia.  _ She swallowed down the bitterness, forcing her tone to soften.

“Do you know what the trial was about, Mrs Ganez?”

“Well,” the woman replied, “Chantelle’s father was a Slavy’Coj. I think it was something to do with that.”

She nodded, reading the conditions on the consent form. “Do you know how she got involved in this?”

“She didn’t say. But she was given time to think about it.”

That struck her as an interesting answer. Time to think meant no pressure, no one prodding Chantelle into anything she didn’t want to do. 

Maggie flipped more pages, seeing experiment hypothesis, results laid out in a series of graphs. There was a lot of information in this pack, and as she went through, she continued to ask questions. How long did the research last? Did Chantelle get sick at all, did her mood change, did she ever say what she did?

Or where the trials took place. 

Nothing incriminating came up in the answers Mrs Ganez provided, but after a lull in questions she said; “She was very happy to work with Ms Danvers.” 

Maggie raised her head for confirmation. “She worked with her directly?”

“Yes. Chantelle said she was kind, very keen. And she generously rewarded Chantelle for her time.”

And there came the disconnect. Any theory about the Danvers taking advantage of poor aliens for illegal experimentation disintegrated with both this information and the attitude of Mrs Ganez. The other families hadn’t really been sure of the involvement their loved one had with the company, but in this case, the link wasn’t negative in the slightest. 

“Ms Danvers was not involved in Chantelle’s death, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Maggie closed the file and looked up in surprise. “You don’t believe so?”

“Ms Danvers is a good soul.” She tapped her heart, then her temple. “We know. She respects our community. Whoever killed our Chantelle…” She shook her head.

When Maggie left the apartment, she found that there was a text from Alex, asking her how she felt with the experiences following the helmet, checking up that there were no nauseating side effects. She locked her phone without answering just yet, Mrs Ganez’s voice in her head as she headed back towards the street where her bike was. 

_ Ms Danvers is a good soul. _

~

Maggie hiked up the hill towards the stables. She was bone-weary and ready to crash before she started her work in the morning. After the explosion at the bank, Winn had slipped her the harddrive with the coroner’s reports and emails, but she did not possess the energy to address them today.

As she passed the garages, she registered two women arguing. 

“You can’t do that, Kara!”

_ Alex. _

“Why? You heard what J’onn said. _ And _ you showed her the basement!”

_ Kara _ .

She pressed around the side of the garage, the brick rough against her leather jacket. She peered over some bushes to see Alex and Kara facing off on the path. 

Alex threw her hands up. “Because I needed feedback about the-” 

“It’s the same thing!”

“It’s not the same thing!”

“She was there!” Kara fired back. “I just  _ know _ she could tell-”

“You have no idea-”

“Wait-”Kara put her hand up to stop Alex’s statement. She tipped her head to the side as if she was listening out for something, and then turned to look straight at where Maggie was hiding. 

While her heart seized up, Maggie was sure Kara couldn’t see her in the dark. Still, the blonde wrapped an arm around Alex’s elbow and led her back towards her house. 

Maggie waited until they disappeared around a hedge before making her way onto the path, which would lead down the slope to her cabin. As she passed where the sisters had been arguing, she caught something with her boot. 

She bent down, picked it up, and tilted it into the lights of the estate. 

It was a black balaclava. 


	5. Chapter 5

All of a sudden the long day grew longer, the find on the path re-energising Maggie.

She had bundled the mask into a bag and called Winn, instructing him to get to the estate as quickly as he could. He texted her updates from his Uber as she paced, and finally she met him on the lawn of the cabin. 

She threw the bag in his direction, and it fell lamely at his feet. 

“What, no hello? What’s the rush?” He bent and scooped the bag, limp from its lack of contents. “What’s this?”

“It’s about this afternoon,” she said, walking very close to him. 

“Yes, but-”

She put a palm on the bag, stopping him from zipping it open. Then, even in the scant light which poured from the cabin’s windows, she could see the dawning on his face. 

“Oh.”

“Just take it.”  _ And trust me _ , she thought. “Find out what you can.”

Winn crumbled the fabric of the backpack, then shook it out and swung it around his shoulders. He glanced at the cabin, and then around them at the darkened estate grounds. Finally, he shifted closer to her, gaze fixed on the main house. “What is it?”

“You’ll see.”

She hadn’t even asked if they’d found anything interesting in their scout of the exhibition centre. She just went back in and considered making camomile tea and meditating, then hesitated at the sight of a bottle of scotch she had brought on her way back from National City. Her brain whirring, she chose neither and flung herself back onto the couch. 

She hadn’t lit the electronic fire night. Only the ticking clock was her company. 

She opened her laptop, the tiny blue light on the external harddrive that Winn had given her that afternoon blinking to life. She accessed the morgue reports, but failed to concentrate on any of the words in front of her.

She picked up the remote and clicked on the TV, thinking over and over again about Mrs Ganez, how she had described Alex’s attitude towards the alien community. 

She didn’t expect to see Lillian Luthor getting more coverage on the news, but it was what she found. As far as Maggie’s knowledge of her went, after her son Lex had been put in prison, she had taken temporary control over LuthorCorp. 

Now, clad head to toe in the kind of rich, old money garnish that wasn’t to be found in the Danvers residence, she gave a speech from the LutherCorp lobby. The bank of journalists sat patiently, like dogs waiting to be fed. If Maggie looked closely, she thought they might be salivating over their notepads and smartphones. 

_ “...I have been very vocal about my desire for LuthorCorp to be innovators…”  _ She paused, cool gaze piercing right through the screen.  _ “I am pleased to announce that we at LutherCorp have a new product in development which we hope will push security and law enforcement into a new era.” _

A ripple went through the journalists. Some of them were already thumbing at their phones, likely on Twitter, ready to race out the information. 

_ “It’s called Neuro-Connect.” _

She turned and pointed a small remote at a lobby screen behind her. A graphic of a headdress-shaped prototype appeared, with 3D renderings of different human body types. The journalists cooed and cameras snapped. 

Lillian, smug, turned to her attentive audience.  _ “Any questions at this early stage?” _

As the captive journalists rose to their feet and raised their voices, Maggie concentrated on the prototype of Neuro-Connect, the way the headdress was styled onto a person’s head. 

“Shit,” she mumbled. While the product may not function at all as Alex had designed hers, it was similar enough that it might take the sting out of the Expo. Could DBS have a corporate spy inside after all? Leaking information?

And what did that have to do with the alien deaths?

Her phone rang, and she answered it automatically, keeping her eyes glued to the press conference. 

_ “Maggie, what the hell?” _

She winced at Winn’s sharp tone. “So you’ve seen it? The mask?”

_ “Where did you get this?” _

“Kara dropped it. I came back and I heard her arguing with Alex by the garage, and when they left, there it was.” She licked her lips. “Could be a coincidence.”

_ “Could be that floating girl.” _ She could hear the gears whirring in his head as he picked up steam.  _ “The floating girl could have been the girl at the bank.” _

“Exactly.”

Maggie needed to find out who that girl was, and where she was during the day, when she wasn’t saving National City from bank robbers. If Kara had the balaclava, did that confirm the girl was inside the house, and if so, where? What, if anything, had it to do with the deaths? 

As Winn spoke again, Maggie thought of that huge, nuclear bomb-proof vault door in the basement.

_ “What does this mean?” _

Her head hadn’t stopped since found the mask, unable to concentrate on a single decision or even object. She lay back on the couch, pinching the bridge of her nose. 

She didn’t know what it meant. 

Yet. 

~

Given the events of the previous day, Maggie overslept her alarm and headed to the stables late. Still somewhat groggy, she started her tasks, and after an hour or so began to feel more awake and motivated. 

As the clock crept towards lunchtime, she wondered whether she could plan her way into the house again. She had one place left to check out: the roofspace. After she had scouted that, she figured she could try and convince Alex to show her what was in the vault.

But something about manipulating Alex struck a sour note. When undercover in the past, Maggie didn’t have a problem pressing buttons and pulling levers with people in order to find the answers she needed. And at the beginning of this assignment, as she thought of those four aliens, she didn’t have a problem doing that to the Danvers, either. 

Yet now she felt she had seen a side to Alex which - while not proving her innocence- didn’t lend itself to the kind of sociopathic, sadistic drive required for experimentation at all costs.

She stoked down Krypto’s nose. “What do you think, boy?”

He huffed, leaning closer and sniffing at the air, his nostrils flaring. She grinned. “Sorry, no carrots.”

Her phone bleeped: a text from Alex asking her to come to the office. Looking down at her mucky boots, she wasn’t sure whether to feel dread or excitement. She changed into a cleaner pair of sneakers which she kept in the stable office, her fingers trembling either way. 

Discarding the lab, Maggie hadn’t been past the kitchen. As she traversed the gravel path around the fountain and towards the patio, she wondered what the rest of the house was like. The closer she got, the more intimidating its ginormous, hulking size was. 

As she slipped through the patio doors into the kitchen, she watched two men carrying a tall box from the basement door. A third followed, carrying a black monitor, its plug dangling down and hitting his knee. As they passed and headed out to the hall, Maggie realised that overseeing this process was Eliza. 

The matriarch was not someone she had had a lot of contact with, and she felt tentative about making her presence known. 

“Is this customary?” Eliza asked, wincing as the plug hit against the doorframe on the way past. 

Maggie took a deep breath, stepping forward. “Afternoon, Mrs Danvers.”

“Oh, hello Maggie. This is...” Exasperated, she waved behind her. “Is there something that you’re looking for?”

“Uh…”

Quite frankly, Maggie was so surprised at the way Eliza spoke to her, she had forgotten why she was in the kitchen at all. To be referred to by her first name by her millionaire employer was significant, especially since she was sure that other wealthy people probably didn’t even want their outdoor staff inside at all. 

Luckily, she was saved by Alex coming towards them from the hallway, followed by the three removal men. 

“Mom, stop annoying those guys just trying to do their job.”

Dressed in jeans and a flannel, Alex’s attire was pedestrian. With no hard edges, or cold materials, she was warmer, amplified by the smile she gave at the sight of Maggie. 

“Alex!” Eliza called over the three men’s boots thundering down into the basement. “Is all of this necessary?”

While ruffled by her mother’s words, Alex kept an even tone. “Mom, this is my first Expo as CEO. It  _ needs _ to be good.” She maintained her calm, steady rebuttal as Eliza tried to protest. “ _ Especially _ after that announcement about Neuro-Connect. I need to get out first and I need it to be…”

Just like that, the tension dissipated as Eliza put a hand on Alex’s shoulder. “I know how hard you’ve worked on this sweetie.”

Maggie turned to concentrate on the chef and her assistant cleaning up from lunch as mother and daughter shared a tender moment. However, Eliza’s next choice of words broke the bond immediately; 

“You know, your father-”

Alex stiffened and shrugged her off. “No, not- don’t-”

She jerked her chin at Maggie and turned on her heel, retreating down the hallway. 

Eliza looked apologetic, mouth in a pinched line. “Well, back to this,” she joked weakly, waving towards the basement door as one of the men emerged with another widescreen computer monitor.

Maggie bounded off after him, catching up with Alex at the bottom of a grand staircase. The man turned right and headed out of the grandiose front door, while Alex climbed up the first few steps. 

She turned when Maggie didn’t follow. “Come on.”

Maggie pointed at her sneakers, then at the plush carpet, which had Alex smirking. “Take them off, then.”

She scoffed, but Alex raised an eyebrow and then continued her ascent up the stairs. She waited at the top as Maggie again stared up disbelievingly, and finally sat down to unlace them. She received a strange look from the removal men as she neatly set the sneakers to the side and then headed upstairs in her socks. 

“What’s today’s science project?” she asked. 

“No science. Just…” Alex paused to peer out of a window as the three men carefully loaded a blackbox onto their truck. She made a noise in the back of her throat, then continued on. “Everything is super crazy and I need to clear my head.”

“Therapist hours are extra on top of my salary.”

On their march towards Alex’s office, Maggie drank in the upstairs hallways. It was tasteful, in her mind, the choice of ornaments, decor and art on the walls. As Alex reached her office, Maggie suspected these were her design choices. The dark carpet was soft under her sock-clad feet, but Alex’s office had a wooden floor which was cold as she stepped inside. 

“Let’s take the horses out,” Alex said, rounding a large oak desk to sit behind two flatscreen computer monitors. In front of them sat a laptop, which she signed into. “I just need to…deal with this.”

Maggie flexed her toes against the chill of the floor. She hovered by a bookshelf, absently reading the titles as Alex typed in fits and starts. Many were scientific textbooks, but there were some novel titles she recognised. The rest of the room had a minimalist appearance: some dark and white furniture, a few framed photographs, a set of two black leather couches, a matte coffee cup abandoned on a window sill. 

Noticing her, Alex said, “Take a seat.”

Maggie rounded one of the couches and saw the perfect finish of the leather. She was scared she would leave a scratch on it as she turned and sat. 

After another minute of typing, Alex closed the laptop and sighed. “Listen, Maggie-”

A knock came to the door, interrupting her. “They better not have broken something,” she muttered, charging to the door and yanking at it. The tension drained from her immediately. 

“J’onn,” she said, then glanced quickly at Maggie, “J’onn, it’s a nickname.”

The company CFO Hank Henshaw peeked around the door, giving Maggie a thin smile. “Alex, can I speak with you?”

“Sure.” Alex held up five fingers, indicating that she wouldn’t be long, then she followed him out of the door. 

Maggie looked at the laptop, listening to the voices carrying down the corridor. If it operated on the same internal network as the terminal in the basement...

The effects of Renutia had worn off, but her brain still clearly contained the information she had absorbed after the test. 

The passcodes and the order of files were all crystal clear. 

This was her chance. 

She got up and launched herself over to the desk. When presented with the login page on the laptop, she remembered the passcodes she had been able to memorise.

She hit enter. And was in. 

Hearing her own breaths coming short and fast, Maggie glanced at the dark door, then the computer screen, then the door again. She bit at her bottom lip, then sat in Alex’s chair and glanced around. She had no removable USB stick, or an optical drive, or even Winn’s harddrive to steal the data quickly 

Luckily, there was a black laser printer tucked under the desk at her feet. She blew out a breath; the old-fashioned way would have to do. 

She clicked on the file registry and toggled through menus towards the  _ ‘Candidate - FollowUps’ _ folder and clicked on it. Documents sprawled from left to right, and she scrolled through the names but nothing jumped out at her. She panicked, selected a spreadsheet file named  _ Subject _ _ _ Masterlist _ , and hit print. 

The printer gurgled to life below her. So much adrenaline was pumping around her body, she felt light headed. At any moment Alex could return to find her stealing corporate and confidential information. In all the scrapes she had gotten herself into, this one seemed the riskiest.

Faintly, she heard laughter from outside. The white paper slithered into the machine. Her heat squeezed. 

Then, from below her the printer let out an angry bleep. On its LED screen read words which made Maggie feel like she was going to vomit on the office’s shiny wooden floor: 

_ CAUTION: Paper jammed! _

“Oh shit,” Maggie hissed, dipping under the table and fighting with the paper until, with an offended rattle, the paper slid fully into the machine and began to print. Crouched down and watching the names appearing from below, Maggie could feel the sweat beading at her temples. 

Outside, the voices grew closer, Maggie snatched the pages which had finished printing, folding them down into untidy squares and shoving them into the pockets of her jacket. 

Louder. The penultimate page, tearing slightly from the rough and rapid treatment. 

Louder, Alex and Hank’s deeper tone. The last page was only mid-way printed.

The voices paused outside of the door, their conversation lowering into hushed tones. The printer paused, as if teasing Maggie, then spat out the last page. Huffing, Maggie folded it too and shoved it into the pocket of her jeans. She closed the documents window and shut the laptop.

“Yes,” she whispered victoriously, checking all of the pages were safely tucked away. 

She ran and sprawled herself onto the leather couch just as the door opened. Thankfully, Alex was too distracted by the smartphone in her hand to notice Maggie’s red face and heaving chest. 

“Problems?” Maggie said, voice hoarse.

“Not anymore.” Alex locked the phone and pushed the door even wider, indicating it was time to leave. “Shall we?”

They left the office and descended the stairs. Maggie was so hazy with the relief, it was Alex who had to stop them at the bottom and remind her of her sneakers. 

~

Krypto, being a taller horse than Gertrude, had a gait which took Maggie a few minutes to get used to. She liked to keep herself in shape, but cursed the requirement of an abdomen like a brick wall in order to ride. 

Even with the beautiful California weather, Maggie could feel the gloom radiating off of Alex, only a few paces ahead on Gertrude. 

As they transferred from the gravel to the grass, she took her chances to ask. “Neuro-Connect is close to your project, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know.” Alex glanced over her shoulder. “I’m waiting for her to announce more details. Waiting for her to just drop the…”

She trailed off, but Maggie understood the frustration. The limbo between the announcement and more details. Would investors be as knocked out by the helmet design and function at the Expo? Or would they be cautious, given a rival technology company was racing to produce a product similar in design, if not function?

As if in disgust, Gertrude tramped and snorted, bringing a smile to them both. Alex reached down and patted her tawny neck. “Yeah girl, you’re right.”

They headed up the grassy mound, where Maggie had spent the first few nights of her job plotting her way into the Danvers’ house. The stolen documents grew somehow heavier in her pockets. 

“Dad bought me Gertrude just before he died…” Alex said, as they reached the highest point. “She was this silly little foal...it was a joke, you know? I wasn’t exactly the kind of girl to demand a pony.”

Maggie looked over at Alex as she brought Gertrude to a stop. From this vantage point, the true size of the estate could be seen. 

“I can’t imagine you were, no.”

“He bought Krypto too.” Alex sounded fond of the white stallion. “He let us name them.”

“The names do seem like they were given by teenagers…”

Alex slid down from Gertrude’s back and let go of the reins. She stayed still, and when she trusted that the horse was not going to bolt away down the hill, she took a few steps back. Then she lowered herself to the grass, bringing her knees up tightly to her chest. 

“My dad worked with Superman to develop his early research,” she said. 

_ Hold on.  _ Maggie felt ridiculous sitting high on a horse, staring at the back of Alex’s head, as this revelation was unearthed. However, this way she was able to control her reaction. She slid from Krypto’s back, wondering where this conversation would possibly go.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.” Alex sifted her fingers through the grass, almost exactly as Maggie had as she pondered this land being bought and owned. “I’ve always wanted to expand on that.”

Maggie gently patted Krypto’s neck then moved to join Alex on the ground. She knew that the CEO was strong enough to push back if she got any question she didn’t want to answer, and with the documents hidden away on her person, Maggie wondered where she could begin. Could she use this alien experimentation link to figure out why the alien victims had the business cards?

Yet there was something else which held Maggie’s curiosity: the sudden death of Jeremiah Danvers and the effect the loss had on Alex, both as a scientist and as his grieving daughter. 

Seeing it as a way to climb even further up a ladder and peer over Alex’s walls, Maggie softened her voice as much as she could. 

“What happened to your dad?” 

“He died in a helicopter accident.” Alex watched her fingertips sift through the grass again and again. “He told us that he had to head back to the labs for late night research, but security said he never turned up.”

The movement was hypnotic. The grass becoming fluid. Maggie couldn’t help watching. 

Alex’s voice retreated into herself. “Their helicopter experienced technical difficulties. It went down…he died...” 

Not dissimilar to a private jet getting into difficulties and would have certainly been a fatal crash: had a mysterious girl with mysterious powers not saved it… 

“But I always wondered, why didn’t he take a limo downtown?” Alex asked, “The helicopter didn’t crash anywhere near the city.”

Maggie tore her eyes from the grass, looking up at Alex’s forlorn expression. “You suspect there was more to it?”

“Yeah. As a teenager, I always imagined he was killed by a rival, trapped and targeted somehow, especially growing up in this industry, it’s ruthless.”

She clenched her fist and ripped up a tuft of grass. Then, she lifted her hand and let the grass blow away in the breeze.

“But I could never prove it.”

“I’m sorry.”

Alex suddenly stood, slapping her palms to rid them of grass. The sudden noise startled the horses slightly. 

“It was a long time ago. I was a dumb kid.”

She hoisted herself up onto Gertrude’s back and firmly grasped the reins. Whatever this brief excursion had been, it was over. Maggie cursed her missed chance at burrowing deeper, but realised Alex may just have needed some fresh air after all. 

As they made their way back to the stables, Alex was deep in thought.

“You okay?” Maggie prompted. 

“So you’re…” Alex cleared her throat, readying herself to switch gears. “You date women...”

Maggie was thrown off-kilter by the question. “Yes.”

“How did you...know?”

“Um, I guess when I went to high school.” She tightened her grip on the reins as she thought of that winter’s day in Nebraska. “There was a girl. I got thinking. I hit a wall. A realisation.”

Alex was quiet for a second or two as the horses crunched back onto the gravel. When she spoke, it was with a very neutral tone. “That’s how it happens.”

“Yeah. That’s how it happens.”

As the horses crushed gravel underhoof, Maggie sunk into how quiet the estate was. Away from the suburbs, from the city life, the traffic, and even the trucks steaming through the desert; the rustling bushes were loud in comparison. 

“I think I had a girl like that.”

Maggie almost slid sideways off of Krypto. When she thought of getting closer to Alex, getting this private was beyond what she imagined. 

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I think so.”

Adjusting herself in the saddle, Maggie glanced over. Obviously, this was not coming out of the blue; Alex had been thinking about it. She couldn’t help but be sympathetic; did she have no one else to discuss this with?

“You don’t have a lot of time for dating, do you?” she asked. 

“It’s a busy life, stepping up to run a company. I was sort of taking over when Hamilton was still in charge. You know, rope by rope.”

“The announcement was just formal.”

“Exactly, yeah.”

_ So worried, so guarded, and yet… _

All the money, power and influence this woman had, and perhaps the first person she was coming out to - even partially - was her stablehand. 

Part of Maggie ached. If this situation wasn’t as it was- stolen documents, alien deaths, suspicion and thought polarising and scattering her very thoughts - maybe Alex would be the kind of woman Maggie could fall in love with. Smart, brilliant, coy when she wanted to be. Gorgeous, and bike-loving, and career driven. 

But the way of the world was that Alex Danvers was a multi-millionaire, whom Maggie couldn’t disconnect from four aliens being kidnapped, killed and dumped around National City. The despair left her almost lazy in the saddle. 

Of course, she realised, if this wasn’t the way of the world, then they wouldn’t have met at all. 

~

Their trip drew to a close as it neared dinner. Meandering back down towards the stables, Maggie felt a wave of deja vu, finding Kara in her blue coat, leaning against the paddock fence. 

“Hey,” she said, sheepishly revealing the carrots she had tucked behind her back. 

Alex slid off of Gertrude’s back and strokes the horse’s nose above the leather strap. “Hey.”

“J’onn’s looking for you.”

“He already spoke to me today.”

Kara shrugged. “He said he was trying to call like ten minutes ago.”

“I left my cell phone in the…” Reaching over for her sister’s wrist, she spied the time on the watch. “Shit, the time. We were gone longer than I thought.”

“I’ll deal with this,” Maggie said, taking up the reins. When the Danvers sisters seemed ready to protest, she almost reminded them - once again- that it was literally her job. 

There was a silent conversation between Alex and Kara then, a will of words between just their eyes, as if a pendulum had stopped midswing. 

Then it completed it’s arch: Alex nodded. “Thanks.”

And that was that. She started up towards the mansion. Maggie’s nerves buzzed: stolen documents with the candidate names and numbers, confirmation of historic experimentation on Superman, Alex’s pondering on her sexuality...

She let the horses into the stables and started the process of their disrobing, carefully hanging up each piece of equipment as she went. Kara followed, cooing at both of the horses, asking them about their walk around the estate. 

As she was hanging up a saddle, Kara finally addressed her, “How are you? After yesterday, I mean.”

Maggie froze. Her day off. The bank. 

Her arms trembled as she held the heavy saddle in the air. “What do you mean?”

“I-” Kara stopped, then started again, higher, “Oh, I heard there was an explosion downtown and um-” 

Maggie hooked the saddle and slowly turned. Kara fixed her glasses and talked with her hands. 

“You know, it’s your day off, I’m assuming you went into town, right?”

“I did.” Maggie crossed her arms over her chest. “I was across the road when it happened.”

“Oh my god.” Kara fiddled with her glasses again. “A-And we still don’t know what those guys wanted to achieve by bombing the bank.”

“Maybe it was just a threat, they wanted to rob it.” Maggie dug her fingernails into her bicep. “My friend James is a photographer at CatCo, he got some great pics.”

“Oh?” Her voice cracked. “Photographs of- the- uh- explosion?”

“Yup. The aftermath mostly…” Maggie didn’t think she could have handled any more cardio today, any more adrenaline rushing into the bloodstream, but the strange signals Kara was giving off were sending her heart rate through the roof. “But he also caught the person responsible for saving the people in the building and tying up the bombers.”

Kara twitched. “It’s good you didn’t get hurt. You and your friends.”

_ Friends.  _

She had only mentioned James. Not Winn. Maggie began to formulate a trap. “It’s crazy that girl turned up. Had Superman-like powers.”

Without Maggie’s help, but a failing-to-play-cool Kara decided to walk herself into the trap early. “I always complain that Superman’s never around when he needs to be.” She rolled her eyes. “But typical Clark-”

“Kent?”

At the cut-in, Kara’s mouth hung open for a second. Maggie wasn’t even sure where it had come from.

“I-” Kara tried to swallow, stepping closer, trying to stop the two puzzle pieces coming together. “Maggie-”

Superman being involved in experimentations. Being friendly with the Danvers for over a decade. Being spotted over the house as Clark Kent ‘visits’ the family. It wasn’t a coincidence. Maggie just hadn’t been wild enough with her connections. 

“Clark Kent is Superman?”

It all made sense. It was all there. But there was something more. 

Clark and Kara in the gardens. The girl at the bank. The balaclava. 

Adopted. Kara was adopted. 

Kara-

The mask - 

The argument in the garden between her and Alex - 

Kara desperately tried to lie, holding her hands up and dancing closer. “What? No! Clark is just- he’s just my cousin-he’s not!-” 

But she had butchered this. She couldn’t stop the realisation. So she dropped the denial, her hands falling to her sides as Maggie finally voiced the conclusion they could both see: 

“You’re-”

Clark was Kryptonian, and Kara’s cousin. 

Which meant only one thing. 

“You’re an alien.”


	6. Chapter 6

“You’re-” Maggie reeled, feeling the blood drain to her toes and rivet her to the floor. “You’re the girl.”

Gertrude and Krypto, somehow picking up on the situation, threw their noses over their boxes. With spectators, the moment seemed to focus into a single pinpoint as Kara gave up her fight. 

“Yes.”

Kara in her blue coat. Kara, whom she had met before Alex arrived home. Who’d treated her with respect and with a smile and whom she had theorised could be part of a system which was exploiting aliens. 

But all along was an alien herself. 

Maggie smoothed a hand over her mouth, then said, “You’re an alien. Like Superman.” 

Kara ducking her head. “Yes.”

Everything slotted together. The girl above the house, of course, had been Kara. The alien girl saving the bankers from the robbery, and freezing up at the sight of Maggie below on the steps. The balaclava being dropped, the argument in the garden. 

“You’re the girl above the house.”

Kara took a deep lungful of breath, gripping at her blue coat. “Maggie, I-”

“And Alex doesn’t know?”

“She knows I’m an alien she just...she doesn’t…” Kara pushed her glasses up from the bridge of her nose, as if accepting that she had completely lost control of this runaway-train-like conversation. “I was told not to tell you.”

Maggie’s throat constricted. “By Alex?”

“Yes. She’s protecting me.”

“From people like Lillian.”

“And others,” Kara said quietly, “There are a lot of people who want to hurt people like me.”

Just like that, Maggie saw four faces in her mind. Four families grieving with no answers. She wanted so badly to break her cover. To confess why she had really taken this job. But she had been burned before. 

She paced, chewing at the inside of her cheek, searching for the words. Just as she thought she might have something, Kara perked up all of a sudden. 

“I’m sorry-” She cocked her head, and then backpedalled towards the stable door. “I have to go, I’ll- come by later!”

In a blur, she was gone, the bag of carrots abandoned on the stable floor. 

~

Maggie went back to the cabin. She made dinner. She watched cable news. She tried to sleep. 

She managed a few hours, but was sitting on the edge of her bed before sunrise, rubbing at her eyes. 

“What the hell have I gotten myself into?”

On autopilot, she got up and showered, ate breakfast, and let the horses individually out one after the other into the paddock so that she could muck out their boxes. By lunch time, as she fed them fresh hay, she received a text from Winn saying that the balaclava hadn’t brought up any leads, and that he struggled to find any clues apart from the fact it was a standard long woollen hat - unseasonal for California - with two holes cut out for eyes.

She replied with a noncommittal answer. It was a redundant avenue to follow, given that she now knew who had been wearing the balaclava at the bank. 

Keeping a vigilant eye out for any surprise visits, Maggie spent the afternoon comparing the candidate numbers on the reports she had smuggled out the previous day. She found the four victims’ names, but nothing else of interest, other than information confirming they weren’t part of the trials for Renutia. 

“So if they weren’t part of Renutia, and there isn’t a secret super-soldier project, then what the hell were they doing with the Danvers’ card in their pocket?” she wondered aloud. 

She refolded the sheets with a sigh and threw them down. She needed someone scientifically-minded to go through some of the phrasing on the pages. 

She put her boots on the table, listening to the hollow clops of a restless Gertrude, pondering the idea that she could leverage Kara into spilling information about other aliens who may have visited the property… 

Maggie knew she was swimming in options for what to do next, but too many options meant she was drowning. For company, she reached over to click on an old FM radio which sat in the corner of the office. She tuned through its fuzz, until she received a local news bulletin. 

_ “And following up on yesterday’s news, we have some more information. Apparently a major crash between a school bus and a heavy goods vehicle was avoided by a super strong, mysterious female figure. She was not, as with the incident at the National City Bank, wearing any face covering, but was gone before she could be questioned on the incident.” _

Maggie remembered how Kara had reacted to nothing, a sound only she could hear, and had taken off at the speed of light. She knew, now, what Kara might have picked up.

_ “The driver of the schoolbus suffered a heart attack and swung into oncoming traffic when the girl appeared and managed to avert the collision. The man was then airlifted to St Thomas General hospital by the girl, where he is still undergoing treatment. No one, as yet, seems to be able to identify this secret superhero...” _

But they were wrong, there. 

Maggie could.

~

She was the type of tired where her bones felt like solid gold bars in her skin, weighing her down. Yet her mind buzzed. Was it time to get out? Or was it time to confront Kara again, break her cover, and ask why the hell four dead aliens had their residence in their pocket when they died. 

As luck would have it, Kara was sitting on the step of her cabin when she retired from her duties. She still wore her blue coat, pulled up at the collar. When she saw Maggie she stood, a wry smile on her face. 

Maggie slipped her hands into her back pockets. “How the hell did you stop a crash?” 

“The kids were screaming in fear, the brakes were screeching,” Kara answered, shrugging a shoulder, “I knew something bad was about to happen.”

Maggie let them both in and went to the fridge. She uncapped two beers without asking, and set them both on the coffee table. She sat, and after a minute of uneasy shifting, so did Kara. 

“Do you want to talk?” Maggie asked.

Kara rubbed her palms together. Then she took off her glasses, folded them closed, and set them on the table. In doing so, Maggie had one more realisation. She remembered the night in her office when the Danvers private jet went down. 

The mysterious girl on the news. 

“Yes,” she finally replied. 

So they started at the beginning. Over the course of the next hour, Kara talked about her origins, coming to Earth from Krypton, how the Danvers worked with Clark and got rich from the research, how Clark wanted only a small percentage of the money, because he felt fulfilled by his journalistic work and altruistic deeds. 

She talked about the move from Midvale to a Californian mansion and how the family adjusted. Jeremiah’s death, Alex’s socialite years, being hidden away from the sights and sounds of the city because she couldn’t cope with it all the time. 

Then she spoke about her own search for a purpose, maybe following Clark into journalism, the crushing grief and loneliness she sometimes experienced. 

And then the engine failure, the plane going down, her kneejerk reaction to save her sister. The need to continue to save lives and use her powers, Alex’s opposition to it, the threats she could face from families like the Luthors who want to rid Earth of aliens entirely. 

Through the conversation, Maggie got up to grab them both another beer. She only asked a few questions, letting Kara carry her own narrative, express her own views and experiences. All the time, she longed to blow her cover, to connect with Kara and perhaps gain an ally in her quest for the truth.

But, something on her conscience told her not to, not yet. 

“I’ve never really felt like following Alex and Eliza into this business is for me.” Kara picked at the label of her beer bottle. “Back on Krypton, I was in the Science Guild. Advanced theories and technologies compared with Earth. And yet...this life is not what I want.”

A life without passion could be lonely and a job without passion could run someone into the ground, even if they were an alien.

“Why do you hover over the rooftop?” she asked. 

Kara closed her eyes. “Freedom.”

To suspend, to feel. Maggie was almost envious. 

As Kara finished her beer, Maggie stood up to offer: “You want another?”

“Okay.”

The small voice of acceptance: Maggie thought about Alex earlier that day. How were both of these women with riches and resources beyond Maggie’s wildest dreams at their disposal still so personally lost and lonely?

She went to the fridge to get them both their third drink when Kara spoke again. “Sometimes I wish Alex would let me know more about what she does.”She paused, her tone thoughtful. “Ever since about last year, when she was preparing to be CEO, she’s become way more secretive.”

Maggie stiffened, the bottles clutched in her hands. After a deep breath, she placed them down, popped off the tops, and listened to every word as Kara continued.

“She says she doesn’t want to bore me with the science, since I’m thinking about training as something else. But especially over the last few weeks, she’s getting more and more distant and hiding away what she’s been working on. It was even worse before she came home.”

Maggie handed over the beer. “Guess that’s the way it’s going to be now. Secrets.”

Over the last few weeks. Bodies dropping. Business cards. 

_ Yeah, secrets.  _

~

The next evening, Maggie transformed her coffee table into a replica of the board in her office. She had the morgue reports from the harddrive up on her laptop, scanning to see if there was anything that jumped out at her. 

She turned to the four victims names she had written out and pondered them each in turn: 

Victim one was Jennifer Go, found by a trucker in the desert. She had been abandoned by the side of the road. 

Victim two was Ageddis Aolin, found slumped in an alley downtown. He was the only one of the four victims who was not human passing. 

Victim three was Pobba Porra, whose body was dumped outside a meat-packing factory on the outskirts of the city. It was his place of work, and the find traumatised his colleagues as they went to start their shift.

And the most recent victim was Chantelle Ganez, who was wrapped in a blanket and left on library steps. 

All different species, different life stories, different areas of the city. Nothing connected any of them, nothing was left to suggest where they had been, who had dumped their bodies. And not a hair on any of their heads touched: just a deadly brain injury administered by a mysterious weapon or object.

She gritted her teeth and turned back to the other information on the harddrive. Winn had hacked a secure email chain between the coroner’s office, the Mayor’s office and the NCPD Commissioner. The coroner in particular raised concerns about the brain injuries she had found in her autopsies, citing alien weaponry possibly being employed on National City’s streets. 

The Mayor seemed apathetic about the victims, until a reply from the Commissioner pointed out that this weapon could be unleashed on humans. This had the Mayor changing his tune immediately. Maggie snorted in disgust. 

Her phone buzzed on the table. She picked it up. 

_ “Maggie?” _

She sat up in surprise. “M’gann, hi.”

_ “There’s a guy in this bar looking for you.” _

“Name?”

_ “Uh…” _ There were muffled noises, as well as the typical bar sounds of clinking glasses and raucous laughter. Then;  _ “Wy’Hewrkz?” _

It wasn’t familiar. “Don’t know them.”

_ “Says his daughter is missing. I know that you’re looking into those kidnappings. I wondered if you’d heard anything?” _

Maggie closed her eyes. “Shit.”

_ “Yeah. You haven’t...gotten anywhere with that?” _

She left out a long, slow breath. “Tell him I don’t know anything yet but I’ll keep my eyes and ears open.”

As she ended the call, she heard sirens. In the otherwise quiet estate, it was jarring. She grabbed her phone and her jacket and went outside. She could see the flash of blue lights in the distance, and jogged her way towards the commotion. 

She neared the guard box at the gates, seeing them open. Just outside, two first responders and the night guard were hunched by a dark mass. 

She stopped when she realised what it was.

A body. 

~

She watched as cops arrived, as an ambulance and a doctor confirmed that the person was deceased. Eliza, Kara, and Alex all appeared one after the other. The officers asked standard questions, but it was clear they were securing the scene before detectives arrived. They were polite, civil around money, so different in their behaviour to how Maggie knew they were in the inner city.

The cop stood back respectively, his voice calm, no hint of aggression or accusation even as a dead body had been found at the gates of this property. 

“What were you doing?” he asked. 

Alex replied, “I was having a late meeting with my CFO.”

“Oh yes?”

Crouching by the hedge, Maggie realised something as she looked at the congregated group. With the kitchen staff and the outdoor staff clocking off, and the three family members here in front of her, there was presumably no one in the house. 

She knew the way to Alex’s office now. Were there other documents she could take? 

She took her chance, scurrying up through the gardens to the patio and into the kitchen. Even in the dark, she made her way quickly up the stairs, through the upstairs hallway, and to the door of Alex’s office. 

The lights around the house were off, but Alex’s desk lamps were on. She didn’t get further than the centre of the room when a throat cleared behind her. She spun to see a figure in the doorway. 

“Hank.” She couldn’t look away from his stern features. “I was just...”

She trailed off. He stepped forward, and in a booming voice, shattered all illusions.

“I know exactly why you’re here, Maggie Sawyer.”


	7. Chapter 7

In her life, Maggie Sawyer had only been fully frozen in fear half a dozen times. When her father asked her about the Valentine’s Day card, when her college roommate played a cruel prank, when she found a bleeding body slumped in at a bus stop walking home from a bar. 

And now, as she stared at Hank Henshaw in the doorway. 

“Hank.” 

“I know who you are and why you’re here,” he rumbled. 

The statement rippled away the fear and replaced it with horror, pinprickles creeping over her scalp and down her spine. Still, she stood tall, and took the list of victims out of her pocket. Likely, she would have to add a fifth name. 

She held it up. “This is why.”

He was unfazed. “I already know.”

“Oh yeah?” she countered, stepping forward, “Can you explain why-”

“Maggie,” he said firmly, “We’ve been looking into this as well.” 

She dropped her arm. “What?”

He propped his hands on his hips. “Sit down, please.”

When she didn’t move, he sighed and wandered over to the two leather sofas. He sat heavily, his hands hanging down between his knees. He appeared defeated. 

“When the first victim’s body appeared, we were contacted by the Mayor’s Office, letting us know that our estate address had been found on their person.”

“Of course you were.” She crumpled the list in her fist. “Powerful people protect each other.” 

“Hear me out.” He kept his gaze fixed on a spot on the wooden floor. “Alex was appalled. Jennifer Go had been involved in some early research for another project, not even in the development phrase.”

At the mention of the first victim’s name, aggravation left Maggie’s body, leaving her limp in shock. She was so used to seeing it written down, or writing it down himself, that hearing it aloud was like a siren going off in the room. 

“They were due to come back for a wellbeing follow up. A post-briefing,” Hank continued, “But before we could contact them...”

It visibly distressed him to say, so he heaved himself up and went to the window. He pushed the curtain back with two fingers, looking down onto the scene at the front of the estate gates. “The same with the second, third, fourth, and now…”

Maggie took a step forward, then caught herself. She could sense her defences crumbling. “How did you figure out that I was...looking into this?”

When he turned, her breath stuttered. His eyes glowed crimson, and after a few seconds, a shimmering red light eclipsed his entire body. He took a step forward, and he had transformed into Eliza. Another step, and he was Kara. Then Alex. And finally, when he was in front of her, it was  _ her. _

She stared into her own face, and then abruptly, he morphed a final time into a towering green figure. 

“I am J’onn J'onzz,” he announced solemnly, “The last son of Mars.”

She tried to speak, but all that came out was a squeak from her throat. He spoke again. 

“I have psychic abilities. I advised Eliza to hire you, because I knew you were what we needed.”

“What you needed?” she echoed shakily. 

“A link to the real alien community in National City.” He shifted back into his regular human form, continuing with a regretful tone. “We’re so far away from that. We couldn’t get the answers we sought. I tried to search myself but…” 

Feeling weak at the knees, Maggie finally made her way to the couch and sat down. “And you know what I did?”

“I researched you. I know you’re good at what you do, as a private investigator.”

She watched as he wandered back to the window, running over the last few weeks in her mind. “So you let me sneak around, try and figure out the connection, having Alex as my prime suspect. You trusted me to find the truth.”

“It’s a matter of trust, yes.” He clasped his hands behind his back. “You had to find the truth yourself, to know that Alex was innocent of this. That she, too, was seeking justice.”

“And this? Catching me here?” 

“Time is up, I’m afraid.”

He contemplated the commotion at the gate. Likely, detectives were going through the motions, questioning the family, giving their initial assessments. The lining of the window frame reflected faint flashes of the crime scene photographs being taken. 

A fifth victim. Time was up. 

She got up to join him. Press had begun to gather just outside the gates. Alex was talking to a reporter, but the camera was not yet set off: likely, an off-the-record elbow rub with someone powerful, not the same attacking journalistic style reserved for city types. 

“Does Alex know?” Maggie asked, “About who I am?”

For the first time since he discovered her in the office, his grave expression broke and he cracked a little smile. 

“Oh yes. She does.”

~

Eliza was the first to join them, then a strung-out Alex, then Kara who complained that Clark hadn’t picked up her calls. Finally, the family lawyer, Lucy Lane, entered with her briefcase clutched tight.

The main lights of the room were switched on and the curtains pulled tight. The mood was very sombre, and Maggie felt that even as she wanted answers, she shouldn’t be here at all. 

“Yvonne’s kindly stayed on,” Eliza said, having waited until everyone was present before speaking, “She’s making supper, if anyone has the appetite.”

The woman with the briefcase raised her chin to the assembled. “J’onn, Alex, hi. Kara....” She fixed her gaze on Maggie. “Who’s this?”

“Maggie Sawyer, private investigator,” Maggie said, glancing at Alex’s lack of reaction. 

“What?” Lucy swung towards Alex, then J’onn, but distinctly moved like there was no time to waste. “Well, okay.” She swanned over to Alex’s desk and worked at her briefcase clasp. 

“I’ve been trying to get hold of Clark.” Kara bounced her phone on her knee. “To look into the Lex end.”

“Luthor?” Maggie asked.

“Great,” Lucy muttered, ignoring the question. “That’s the last thing we need.”

J’onn put a hand on Alex’s shoulder, as a father might in this situation. Barely lifting her gaze from the floor, she began to regale them with the state of reality. How the guard had been the one to raise the alarm about a white van pulling up and dumping off the body, how the family had given statements one by one and how the detectives would be working through the night on the scene.

“We can only wait and see what the details are but…” Alex left the rest for the room to add: that it was likely to be the same situation as the other four victims.

“No blood, no bruises, just…” Kara picked at a chip in her phone screen.

“My friend, Winn, has the morgue reports for the previous victims,” Maggie said.

Lucy poked her head between the two monitors. “I don’t want to know how you know that.”

Alex sniffed, but gave her a tired smile. She gravitated over to the leather couches where Maggie still sat, bumping their elbows together. 

“So you know we know.”

Maggie mirrored that tired smile. “I know you know.” 

Kara resumed bouncing her phone on her knee. “So what’s the plan?”

Lucy rifled through papers in her briefcase. “We could get you booked for Cat’s prime time show tomorrow night?”

J’onn shook his head. “That’s not a good idea.”

Kara perked up, interested in the idea. “Why not? Get Alex’s side out as rumours swirl around.”

“It’s a little too tabloid,” Eliza said, worry painted on her face. “This is a murder investigation.”

Maggie realised that as all this unfolded, she still had the list of four victims clutched in her fist. Like a hard flick of a thumb on a lighter, the sight of it made her see red. “The murder of an alien is treated by theory fodder by the media anyway.”

Alex got up and made for the door, seemingly overwhelmed by it all. “I’m...going to…”

Maggie persisted for ten minutes more, long enough to contribute to the discussion of how they were going to pool resources together to handle the media fallout as this broke in the news. A dead body - alien or not - being dropped at the private residence of a wealthy family would be a big story. And naturally, there would be analysis on how the new CEO would handle the personal pressure. 

Maggie eventually excused herself and went in search of Alex. As she passed by the top of the staircase, she saw right ahead that there was a balcony overlooking the patio. The balcony doors were wide open, and Alex was out in the night air. 

Melancholic, gaze fixed on the dark patio below, she barely acknowledged Maggie joining her. The collar of the navy shirt she had on was crumpled, the sleeves wrinkled from where they had been thrown up to her elbows.

“I wanted the Expo to go so well. My first one as CEO.” She drew her fingertips over the stone patterns of the balcony. “But people are kidnapping aliens who just wanted to…”

She hung her head, emotion thickening her voice. “And now they’re dead.”

“It still will,” Maggie insisted, “Renutia is amazing. It’s going to change the world.”

With how far away from the light pollution the estate was, the stars were clear. The moonlight lit up the gardens in a ghostly glow and sparkled in Alex’s eyes as she turned her face upwards. She flinched as she heard the sirens go off again and head off into the night. Likely, one of the patrol cars being pulled away onto another job. 

“I have to leave them to it,” she whispered. 

“Makes sense.”

Alex wiped her tears, then took stock and playfully bumped her shoulder. “For a PI, you don’t half work hard, huh?”

Finally, with no tension or secrets between them, Maggie let out an unrestrained laugh. “I wanted to be convincing.”

“You have a good heart, Maggie.”

“I’m glad I found out you do, too.”

Alex turned to face her, focusing on her forehead. Maggie remembered hitting her head in the pantry on the first night she tried to infiltrate the house. She raised her thumb, as if she was going to touch it, until she snapped out of her trance-like state and stepped back. 

“Speaking of…” She stood straight. “I should call Wy’Hewrkz.”

Maggie’s heart sank. The call from M’gann earlier that night. She looked out at where the cops had finished their work, and the medical examiner’s office was now covering the body and loading it onto their van. 

“Their father.”

Alex gave a short nod, then drifted away back to the hallway and disappeared from sight. 

Maggie stayed out on the balcony for a few minutes longer, thinking of the turn this night had taken, wondering how she had gotten it so wrong. 

~

The next day, Maggie arrived at the stable office to see Alex sitting with her feet on a stool. She didn’t seem well-rested, but she did seem bright. Maggie gave her a quick good morning, then swiftly went towards the cupboard to grab a rake when Alex stood up. 

“What are you doing?” she asked.

Maggie’s hand hovered halfway to the rake. “My...work…?”

“Maggie, I know you’re not a stablehand.” Alex was pleased with herself at finally saying it, judging by the huge grin that spread across her face. She backed towards the door. “Come on.”

“But-”

“We’ve got to find out who’s targeting the aliens volunteering for my work.” She popped her head back in to shout, “Let’s go!”

Maggie obediently followed. As they passed Vasquez, she got a grin and a tip of the sun hat, and began to think that perhaps her cover was blown from the moment she stepped foot on the estate. 

They entered the garage, footsteps echoing as they paced past the assembled vehicles. Maggie whistled, impressed at the deceptively cavernous space and especially impressed at seeing the Ducati up close. 

“Nice ride.”

“Usually I’d say grab your Triumph,” Alex said, motioning her fingers in the air, “But I figured Brian could take us instead.”

Maggie looked up as a man, who had been buffering the bonnet of the limousine, sprung into action and opened up the back door. 

She stopped dead. “You’re kidding.”

“I’m not.” 

With a creaking so sharp it made her wince, the garage doors began to ascend. Alex ducked into the limo. Maggie glanceded at Brian, who still patiently held the door, and then followed Alex inside. 

Even with the tinted windows, she noticed that there was no trace of the crime scene from the previous night when they left the estate grounds. 

They set off towards National City, Maggie drinking in every experience; the leather seats, the luxurious smell of it, the purring engine, zooming past manors and mansions, to gated communities, to suburbs, to city. So much of it holding more money than she could ever imagine. 

She fiddled with the buckle of her seatbelt, watching Alex tick through a list on her phone. 

Alex locked her phone and slid it into her blazer pocket. “First, exhibition centre. I need to see how we’re setting up for the Expo. How it’s going. Any last minute changes.” She gazed out of the window as the concrete of National City began to rise up around them. 

“What about Ya’Hewrkz? Have the police said they’re continuing their investigation?”

“Fat chance.” She fixed a hawk-like gaze on Maggie, sharp enough to pierce through the very leather seats. “Someone killed those aliens. And the police don’t seem to have enough drive to find out who.” She softened, relaxing back from bitter to resigned, returning her gaze to the passing scenes. “But I don’t have to tell you that.”

The lack of a crime scene at the gates told that story already. Maggie brought out the crumpled list from her pocket, the fifth name added at the bottom. 

“Let’s establish what we know.”

They discussed Jennifer Go, the disregard of her body being left in the desert, Ageddis Aolin, slumped in the alley and passed by so many who thought he was a drunk. Pobba Porra, dumped outside his place of work, his grieving colleagues whose views on aliens had been revolutionised - so Alex had heard - by them befriending him. 

And Chantelle Ganez, being wrapped in a blanket and left on the library steps, her mother waiting for her to come home.

Finally, victim five; the one that held the biggest clue to what had happened to these aliens. 

“Given the lack of injuries on Ya’Hewrkz’s body, I think we can agree they fit into the pattern,” Maggie said.

Alex twisted her face slightly. “If we are assuming that the fifth autopsy comes out like that other four…”

“Then all five victims died from brain injuries, caused by an unknown external force which caused no external trauma.” Maggie flagged the list, punctuating each detail. “No blunt force, no bullets, no bleeding.”

Considering this, Alex bit her lower lip. “From the top. What led you to my home?”

Maggie sat straight in the seat, unable to feel liberated at the idea that she wouldn’t have to feed Alex any false narrative. She traced her mind back to the interviews with J’onn, realising that he knew that she was feeding him lies to every question. 

“At first, I thought they were police crimes. We know there’s been coverups in the past,” Maggie explained, “Then, I followed up some anti-alien activity in the National City area, but none of the murders had been claimed by known groups.”

She closed her eyes for a second, remembering the grafting she had done before securing the spot as a stablehand. The grieving family and friends she had spoken to, the networks she had traversed, the nooks and crannies she had crawled into in search of a single lead. 

How Mrs Ganez had spoken so highly of Miss Danvers and her impact on Chantelle...

“The only thing I was able to gleam from my contacts inside the force was that all four victims had a card with your company’s logo and your estate’s address.” Maggie held out her hands, signalling how she had naturally come to the obvious conclusion. “There’d been rumours that there was a blacksite of some kind on your estate, which was true.”

“Okay.” Alex toyed with the buckle of her seatbelt. “And then?”

“Then, the day Lillian announced Neuro-Connect and you invited me into your office, I printed out candidate numbers and located each of the four victims on there.”

“And the fifth,” Alex reminded quietly. 

She reached down for a bag at her feet and pulled out an identical print of the list to what Maggie smuggled out, not surprised in the slightest by the admission. On the sheet, there were five blue circles, each around the five victims. She set it on the plush leather seat beside her, like a third passenger. 

“My father worked with Superman to study how the sun affected his abilities, and used that knowledge to create the medical products which have helped people to see, to walk, to heal,” she said, looking down at the page. “I continued that work when I was qualified enough, but I also wanted to branch out. Recently, J’onn let me study his brain activity, to chart the pathways which would go on to form the initial conception for Renutia.” 

She picked a fleck of dust from her blazer sleeve. Maggie suspected it was more restlessness than anything else. “More recently I wanted to expand into other areas, different species could teach different things.” 

“What was the exchange? Money?” Maggie asked. She grimaced at how blunt it sounded. 

“Money…” Alex conceded, “And healthcare.”

And like that, it clicked with Maggie why Mrs Ganez had been so adamant in her defence of Alex. She had treated them, too. 

“You were their doctor.” 

“Yes.”

Maggie inched lower in the seat again, blowing out a breath. It all made sense now, why the victims were connected to the Danvers estate. Alien healthcare was virtually non-existent on Earth, even in a place like National City. Her friends and even ex-girlfriends had struggled when they got sick, or caught something off-world. 

“I offered them money for their voluntary services during the trials, but I also researched their ailments.” Alex reached down and gently folded a corner of the candidate list. “If Earth is to be more welcoming to aliens, then I figured healthcare should be a priority. It goes both ways too. If they bring an unknown virus from another planet, they could kill off humanity. New knowledge leads to progress.” 

“So...The fifth victim? Ya’Hewrkz?”

“Since she was human-passing, she had met a nice guy and they’d fallen in love, just gotten married. Their species was compatible with humans...sexually.” Alex mournfully stroked one of the blue circles, her voice cracking in slight embarrassment. “She wanted to know if they could have a kid.”

Maggie felt like her stomach was sinking into the leather, right out of her lower back. Alex gave a sad smile. “It was kind of funny, actually. I joked that I didn’t know a lot about gynae, that I’d get in a specialist. Few trusted consultants. Do some scans and research as much as I could…” 

She thumbed at the circle once more, then turned it over completely showing the white blank side up. “Guess I’ll never know.”

The car came to a stop and died off into stillness. Maggie sat up straight and looked out of the window. In the front cabin, Brian shouted back: 

“We’re here, Miss Danvers.”

But the building outside was one Maggie recognised, not where Alex said they were going. 

“This isn’t the exhibition centre,” she said.

“No,” Alex said, raising an eyebrow. “It’s not.”

It was Winn’s apartment building. 

~

Winn was in shock that the ruse was up. While they assured him that he wasn’t in trouble, he spent the best part of the journey to the exhibition centre hugging his equipment to his chest, his usual comfort strategy.

Alex smiled at how ridiculous he was, saying, “I think the edge of your case is digging into the leather…”

Horrified at the idea of damaging the expensive material, he chucked the heavy backpack to the floor.

When they pulled up at the venue, she realised she hadn’t given much thought on what to expect, or tried to visualise how the Expo had been set up. She had imagined Alex on a stage, explaining how the Renutia helmet worked, but walking into the sprawling atrium, she was blown away.

Everywhere she looked, there were decals of the  _ Danvers Bio-Solutions _ logo. There were different vendors and stalls from wall to wall. People with lanyards moved here and there, setting up tables and pulling up banners stands. There was a section on historical products and the origins of the company, as well as advertising for the upcoming projects, including the Renutia helmet. 

Winn gripped his backpack, running around like a child in a toy store who didn’t know what to look at first. Maggie hung back with him, while Alex went ahead to speak to security staff. 

“This place is incredible. I mean, I’ve always wanted to attend some kind of technology fair but this is...” Winn said, almost groaning as he saw the displays which were already set up. “Oh hey, look at this!”

He hunched down and grabbed something underneath a table. It was a mobile phone. He turned it over and over in his hands as they headed up towards where Alex was gathered with the staff. 

“Hey, we found this,” Maggie said, pointing at the phone. A few of those assembled patted their pockets, but most stared blankly at it. “No one owns it?”

“Set it there on that table and if it’s one of the staff they’ll come up for it,” a burly security man said.

Maggie laid it on the table, then went to Alex’s side. She was frowning at a tablet screen, watching CCTV footage. She stabbed a finger on the pause button, her shoulders dropping. 

“What happened?” Maggie asked. 

“Someone broke in last night,” Alex said, “Nothing was stolen but…”

Winn shifted his weight from foot to foot. “The security here.” He leaned closer. “Is it yours or the centre’s?”

Alex stole a glimpse at the trio in security lanyards. “The centre’s, why?”

Maggie followed his train of thought. “Easier paid off…”

A shadow passed over Alex’s face. She rewound the CCTV clip and played it again, this time tilting the tablet screen to let Winn and Maggie see. It showed a figure in a hood, shuffling through the empty exhibition room, looking this way and that at the half-dressed booths, the tables with nothing yet on them, the banners and posters lining the dividers. 

They crept closer to the security camera, and then looked up at it as if just noticing they could be being watched. 

Maggie made a noise in her throat. 

It was the fifth victim: Ya’Hewrkz. 

“Oh man,” she said.

“It’s okay, the exhibits were locked up. Nothing stolen.”

Maggie glanced at Alex, then reached over to pause the video. “No, look.”

Alex peered closer, then went pale in realisation. “Oh.”

The video was timestamped just a few hours before their body was left at the gates to the Danvers estate. 

“Look at that,” Winn said, pointing at something in Ya’Hewrkz’s hand. 

It was a mobile phone. The same one they had found between the booths. 

Without speaking, he turned around and hauled his laptop bag onto one of the free tables. He booted it up, then rifled through his bag, pulling out a number of cables and harddrive-sized devices. Taking the phone, he plugged it into an interface and connected it to the laptop. 

Alex put the tablet down and watched him typing with suspicion. “This is tampering with evidence, right?”

“Well, it isn’t like we aren’t able to track down the perpetrator,” he said. 

Within a few minutes, he had cracked into the phone, its data at his fingertips. He glanced nervously at the security team, then searched through the messages until he found what he was looking for. Maggie and Alex peaked over his shoulders as he brought up the last exchange the victim was involved in. 

It was from that morning of that same day: 

**Alex Danvers** : Could you come to a late debrief tonight at 8?

**Ya’Hewrkz** : Uh, sure? At the estate?

**Alex Danvers** : Yes please.

Maggie watched as, expression dulled, Alex’s eyeline scanned back and forwards over the three messages. Then she pulled her phone out of the pocket, shakily thumbed at the screen, and threw it down beside the laptop. 

“This isn’t from me.”

The previous messages on the laptop above this exchange perfectly matched the timestamps and messages on the phone, but the last three were not present. 

“They might be using some sort of hijacking transmitter or software,” Winn said. 

Maggie lifted the tablet, clicking play on the surveillance footage and watching Ya’Hewrkz’s movements. While she didn’t have any frame of reference for them, she could tell the behaviour wasn’t natural, as if they were being controlled by something. They didn’t look like they were stealing; they looked as if they were drinking in as much information about the security: the exits, the cameras, the placement of the booths. 

And there was something about their eyes. Searching without seeing...

“You were being watched,” Maggie stated, mulling a few theories in her mind. 

Alex sighed, shoulders slumping in defeat. 

“Yeah, well, so were they.”

~

Despite the lack of traffic at the evening hour, the ride back to the estate felt twice as long. Alex spent much of the journey with her forehead leaning against her window, staring out into the night. Maggie stole glimpses of the city lights racing across the features of her face, until they headed to the suburbs and it was less frequent, and by the time they neared the estate, it was darkness. 

As they pulled up to the front of the house and got out to stretch, Alex thumbed at the front door. 

“Would you like to stay here tonight? We have a few guest rooms,” she said, somewhat bashfully beneath her exhaustion, “Saves you walking down to the cabin.”

“Nah.” Maggie scuffed her boots against the gravel. “I think I need to go and sleep it all off. Process, you know?”

“I know.”

And yet neither of them moved. The light that filtered through the glass panels on either side of the front of the manor bathed Alex in a warm light. Maggie’s heart thumped. 

“Four sleeps to go.” When Alex’s brow knitted together, Maggie clarified, “The Expo.”

“Oh.” Alex squeezed her eyelids shut. “Fuck. Yes.”

Again, they lapsed into quiet. A slight breeze rustled at the hedges, the wheels of the limo crunched as Brian drove it back towards the garage. They seemed to come closer through magnetism, neither one wanting to be the one to walk away. 

“Listen, Alex-”

She was cut off by a kiss, lips both soft and firm against her own. Maggie’s hands flew to Alex’s elbows, as a warm touch cupped her cheeks. 

Then, in another instant, the touch was gone. Alex gaped, then danced her hands in the air. 

“I-Sorry-” She stepped back, heels crushing into the gravel. “It’s the stress. I should- Goodnight.” 

She hung her head and raced up the stone steps, leaving Maggie there outside, touching her lips. 


	8. Chapter 8

The crowd bustled and jostled, their signs in a thicket above their heads. They extended the entire way along the street and swole out into the square. At the front, a stage had been set up, where technicians were adjusting amplifiers, a microphone and a podium. People laughed and posted pictures to social media as they waited for the line-up of rally speakers to appear. 

It would be the first major pro-alien demonstration in National City amongst the recent rise of anti-alien sentiment. Maggie, Winn and James watched from the dented, blue mailbox they had used as their congregation point. James had his camera, snapping off pictures while Winn crunched at a bag of Doritos. Both of them were pondering the catch-up tale that Maggie had spun. 

While Winn piped up at points, he mostly just nodded along with the details. Finally, James asked, “All this in a few days, huh?” 

“That’s why we’re all a dream team, now,” Winn concluded, scrunching the now empty bag of Doritos.

“If you can’t beat em, join em, apparently.” He was amused by the idea that Maggie had been caught, and that all along the Danvers family had also been investigating the deaths. “Can’t believe the cat joined the mouse.”

“There was no cat,” Winn quipped. 

“Oh, there’s a cat alright. It just wasn’t Alex Danvers,” Maggie said, tucking her hands into her leather jacket. Her attention drifted back to the crowd. There were no routes closer to the square, the crowd was so dense. “This turnout is crazy.”

“I can’t believe it,” a fourth voice said. 

Maggie spun to see Kara behind them, standing on her tip-toes and reading some of the pro-alien solidarity signs. 

“Kara.” Maggie faced her fully. “What are you doing here?”

“I flew here-” She stopped short as she registered Winn and James’ presence. “On a bus…”

“Isn’t this dangerous for you?” Maggie hammered her phrasing deliberately to get her message across. But Kara waved her hands around, eager to change the subject. 

“You know, there’s supposed to be a storm tonight.”

While the sky was blue, the atmosphere swirling around them felt dangerous enough. “Famous last words,” Maggie murmured, giving up on shooing Kara away. 

A commotion kicked off several yards ahead as a group of boys shouted abuse at the pro-alien demonstrators, spitting and swinging at their signs. 

Uneasy, Winn leaned closer to his friends. “This doesn’t look good, guys.”

Maggie smirked as the demonstrators gave as much abuse back as they received, united and loud. “You could never have lasted on my college campus. Picketing all day, partying all night.” 

He wrinkled his nose at her, causing Kara to laugh. She leaned closer James, who was squinting at the LED screen of his camera. 

“What are you looking at?”

He held it out for them to view, clicking through his last few snaps. “That van seems out of place.”

Maggie went ramrod stiff. A white van had dumped Ya’Hewrkz’s body outside of the Danvers estate. Could it be the same registration, make, model? 

James climbed up onto a nearby park bench to get a better view. Just as he started clicking off the camera, the front of the crowd erupted in a crackle like static electricity. People shrieked, scattering as puffs of grey smoke wisped and coloured lights flashed. 

“Fireworks!” someone yelled.

Kara reacted like a guard dog might, puffing her chest out and pressing forward towards where the fireworks had gone off but Maggie put her arm out in warning. 

“Hey!” James exclaimed, pointing over the crowd.

“Did you see who threw them?” Maggie shouted, barely heard over the din of the panicking crowd. 

“They got into that van-” He had barely finished the sentence before he had his camera back at his eye, snapping photographs of the retreating vehicle.

Maggie stepped up onto the bench with him, and caught sight of it steaming away up into a side street and away from the worsening condition of the crowd. Like a contagion, the panic was spreading, people jostling here and there, screeching as more crackers went off at their feet. 

And to make matters even more perilous, the vitriolic anti-alien group had returned, swelled with friends and associates they had called upon. The rowdy crowd pitched right into violence, as some who recognised the group from before confronted them. 

Maggie gritted her teeth at the sight of the chaos around them. Most importantly, she saw how the fighting drew the immediate attention of the assembled media, whose cameras were now being redirected from the stage and pointed at the scuffles breaking out. 

Hopping from the bench, Maggie put herself between Kara and the crowd. “You should get out of here.”

Kara frowned. “What, why?”

“Your face showing up on the national news is the last thing your sister needs.”

“But, the van-!”

“Kara.”

Kara’s mouth worked, but then she seemed to deflate in height. “Fine…” She pulled her signature blue coat further around herself, waving at Winn and James. “It was nice to meet you both.”

She scuttled away from them, keeping her head down. Maggie regarded the escalating situation with a conflicted heart. If she was younger, she might have gotten involved in the raucous, but she didn’t want to dish out violence now. 

After James and Winn had gathered themselves, the three of them wiggled their way through the braying crowd into a quieter side street, then looped back in the direction of James and Maggie’s bikes. Blue lights flashed as sirens rushed past towards the violence. 

James popped the container box on his bike and placed his camera bag inside. He lifted out his helmet and closed the box. “You going back tonight?”

“Yeah,” Maggie said, throwing a leg over her Triumph. 

“Yeah, but…” James glanced at Winn, who thumbed through his phone, scowling at the grid-locked Uber map. “Maggie, your cover got blown.”

“I know but…” She blinked. Why  _ was _ she going back? With her cover blown, she could go back to her own apartment if she wanted. “I just…”

Winn’s head flew up and he pointed in an accusatory way. “You have a crush!”

“What? No!” Her gaze bounced between him and James, who let out a barking laugh. “They don’t have an actual stablehand right now, and there’s a storm coming in, and….well…”

“Uh huh,” James said, unconvinced. He played with his visor, a toothy smile on his face. “She’s pretty, for sure, Kara. But since you aren’t into blondes, I’m guessing it’s the other one you’re after.”

“Shut up,” she grumbled, shoving on her helmet. 

Even as the Triumph roared to life, she heard them laughing behind her.

~

As she gently eased her bike past the gates, she was surprised to find Alex leaning against the guard’s box. The wind had picked up, warning of the thunderstorm which was coming. It lifted the hair from Alex’s neck, as she stepped onto the road to greet her.

After getting her motorcycle helmet off, Maggie asked, “What are you doing out here?”

“I came to check on you! I heard what happened,” Alex said indignantly, “Did you get hurt at the rally?”

“No.” Maggie adjusted herself on the bike, the purring engine not helping her sense memory as she remembered their kiss. “I’m fine.” 

Alex’s lips twitched. “I’ve already got on Kara’s back about it.”

“I can imagine.”

Alex had had meetings all morning, and then Maggie had gone into the city, meaning they hadn’t really had a chance to talk about the kiss. It was clear from how she chewed at her bottom lip that Alex was thinking about it as well, at a loss of what to say. She ran the toe of her boot over the tarmac of the road. 

“James has got some pictures from tonight,” Maggie finally said. “Of a white van, I mean. Could be the one that dumped Ya’Hewrkz’s body at the gates.”

Alex’s brow furrowed. “How do you know?”

“It was agitating.”

“Agitating?”

“Yeah. People got out, set off fireworks, it all got a little…”

The wind whistled through the trees, as if instructing them to abandon the discussion, get inside and shelter from the coming storm.

“I’ve been checking the CCTV from outside over the last few weeks, months. Still a long way to go, but that white van is there again and again…” Alex hugged her arms around her chest. “It’s been here the whole time. I can’t believe it. Just crawling past.”

She stared out of the gates. Maggie watched the long hedges dancing in the strong wind, all the way up to the estate, as if they were performing a worshipping ritual around the fountain. 

“Well, I should-”

“Yeah.” Alex smoothed her hands down her hips. “I’m surprised you came back.”

“I’m not done here.” 

Alex was struck by the simple statement. The rattling of the metal gates behind them exacerbated the strength of it. For a second, it seemed like she was going to lean in and kiss Maggie again, but the presence of the guard box loomed. 

Clearing her throat, Maggie revved her bike. “Want a ride to the top?”

Alex’s smile broke the static tension. “I think I can walk.”

“Alright,” Maggie said, “See you later.”

She put her helmet back on her head and roared towards the cabin, the storm brewing deeper around her.

~

Two news stories moved in tandem across the evening: the incoming storm, and the violence at the pro-alien demonstration. Two dozen arrested, many more checked out by emergency medical services. This violence gave the evening news programmes an excuse to flood the airwaves with hate against the alien populace, claiming they had incited the violence.

With a sneer, Maggie punched the remote with her thumb and killed the TV feed. She showered and changed into soft nightclothes, but couldn’t cope with the cabin’s emptiness as the wind whipped up. She got back into outdoor clothes and hiked through the wind - which had grown strong enough to almost push her back down the hill- towards the stables. 

She got there just before the heavens opened and rain splattered down. Both Gertrude and Krypto had their ears pinned back, pacing back and forth in their confined spaces. 

“Hey guys,” she greeted, smiling as they threw their heads up and snorted at her. She reached up and stroked each of them in turn. “I’m going to keep you company for tonight.” 

She had closed the barn doors to stop the waft of wind coming through the stables, but the structure still shook with the storm’s malevolence. She blew into her hands, rubbing her palms together. 

“Not nearly as cold as Nebraska, but it ain’t warm tonight.” She ambled over to the stone fireplace which formed a central part of the stable building. It didn’t appear to get much use. She inspected it, feeling for a draft, and then began to work at removing the grate. “Let’s see if we can’t get this working, huh?”

She checked that it was viable, then went on the hunt. Searching in the office cupboards, she found a bag of coal and firelighters, and set to work. After ten minutes of trial, error and mild frustration, she saw a spark grow into a red glow and left it to take hold. 

She moved to the stable tap, watching the water turn grey as the coal washed from her hand. She located a clean towel in the office and wiped her hands dry, processing the day, wondering what her next move should be. Perhaps she could get Winn and James to track down the van, and had been sighted both outside the estate and the rally. 

She shot off a quick text to James, asking him to get the registration of the white van from his photographs. If it matched the one on CCTV, it would have been stalking aliens leaving Alex’s estate, which meant they were easy prey to trap and kidnap. And that could also mean it was present at the rally not only to cause disturbance, but also to scout for potential victims. 

As grim as the prospect of that was, they needed to follow the lead. He sent back a thumbs up. 

With a mighty creak, the door of the barn swung open. A hooded figure slipped in and then barricaded the entrance shut again. They brought their hood down and stopped dead at the sight of Maggie by the fireplace.

“Hey,” Maggie greeted.

Alex frowned, waving at the rafters as the building shuddered with the storm. “What are you doing here?”

“Horses are bothered.” Maggie rotated herself so that her back was to the fire, enjoying the heat on her thighs. “I’m a stable hand.”

The dry response drew a chuckle out of Alex, who dripped a train of rainwater as she made her way over.

“Hey, you’re soaked,” Maggie said, reaching for the lapels of her coat without thinking. She pushed it from her shoulders, looking up as a single drop of water hung from the tip of Alex’s nose. She watched it fall, splattering onto the front of her own shirt.

It was then that she noticed there was no space between them. 

Close enough to see Alex’s pupils dilating. “About the other-the other night.”

The fire snapped into life, casting shadows across her face. Bathing them in a radiating heat. 

“Yeah?” Maggie managed, voice stuck deep in her throat. 

The coat fell down onto the stable floor. Neither of them seemed to notice. 

Alex’s lips trembled. “I want- _ need _ \- to know, Maggie.”

She didn’t need to ask what answers were craved. She didn’t even need to think about it. 

She leaned up and captured Alex’s lips. It was as if the fire had jumped out onto her and ran rabid over her body, but it was simply the heat of passion that engulfed her as they pushed frantically together. 

Alex’s hands were wet and cold from the outside, and when they slipped under Maggie’s shirt she gasped and arched. When Maggie did the same, her hands warm from the fire, Alex sighed and melted further into their kisses. 

She faintly registered them stumbling back and with a rustle, they found themselves shin-deep at the beginning of a large pile of fresh hay. She pulled back from their kisses, looked at their ankles, then back to Alex. She swallowed heavily, the building groaning around them in the storm. 

Coming to her senses, Alex blinked around at the stable as if she was surprised to be there. Then she picked up her coat, as if to study the inseams. Maggie glanced past her at the horses, who were shuffling in their pens, ears still pinned back at the storm. 

Alex raised her head, then stepped around Maggie and draped her coat flat onto a high part of the haystack. Then she turned, eyes inviting even as her body betrayed the nerves rolling off of her.

Maggie couldn’t help but be drawn in. The next few kisses burned in a delicious way. Before her common sense kicked in, they were falling back into the yielding pile of warm, dry hay. While Alex was pliant beneath her, Maggie didn’t try and push them forward until there was an impatient tug on clothing or a hand purposely moved along her limbs. Then they were scrambling to undress, to bare themselves to the flames. 

As the thunderstorm rattled the barn doors, they lost themselves in each other’s arms. The hay rustled around them as she ran her hands down Alex’s back and thighs, feeling the heat and power along her flanks. 

They pivoted onto their sides, touches like liquid roaming over bare skin. She touched Alex’s breasts, her stomach, her lower back, moving her kisses down her neck and drinking in each noise of need Alex made against the din of rain battering the roof. She tugged at the plain black briefs and Alex responded immediately, westling them down her own legs and pushing back into Maggie’s touch as if she couldn’t handle peeling herself away for a second. 

But Maggie wanted more. She slithered out from Alex’s grip and shifted down the slant of the hay until she could latch her mouth onto Alex’s nipples. She wasn’t satisfied here until Alex’s hand was woven deep into her hair, curving around her scalp and gripping for guidance. 

Only then did Maggie move down, trailing kisses down a twitching navel, nipping at the places that drew the most movement. Fluid, she lowered further still, until she could catch her teeth against the flesh insides of Alex’s thighs. 

Amongst the smokey stenches that usually hung in the stable air, Maggie could smell Alex’s desire, and it was magnificent. 

It was an awkward gradient with the slope of the hay, but once Alex’s legs were tight against her ears, she made it work. Alex's chest heaved like she couldn’t catch her breath and that was exactly where Maggie wanted her, skating the edge of pleasure as she traced her tongue in familiar patterns. 

“I think…” Alex gasped, “I think, I….” 

Maggie tightened her grip on her hips as her thighs trembled, and with a breathy cry, Alex arched back against the hay. The stable around them shook, as if exalting in the same crest of pleasure. 

Alex pressed her palm against Maggie’s forehead, twitching away in sensitivity. Maggie gave a last kiss to her hip bone and climbed as gracefully as she could back up the uneven hay pile. 

She ran her hand lazily over the millionaire’s stomach as her breathing slowed back to a normal rhythm, letting out a low chuckle. 

“Well,” she appraised, “That was-”

But Alex surged up and kissed her, the afterglow not yet here. The energy was contagious, Maggie returning her affection just as hungrily. This tryst was out of this world bizarre and also as inevitable as a train barrelling straight down the tracks towards her; eventually it would have hit. 

As Alex pushed against her, pressing her against the coat, Maggie’s train of thought became like fog. Both tangible and not tangible. Dispersing easily as the kisses and touches became bolder on her body. She began to feel as if Alex would own her, too, after all of this. After all, she owned everything right down to the singular straws of hay underneath them. 

She didn’t seem to mind that.

As Alex’s fingertips shyly dipped under the waistband of her underwear, she looked down at Maggie through red strands of hair with a lustful curiosity. She gently brushed her nose against Maggie’s cheek. 

“Teach me,” she whispered, kissing under Maggie’s ear, “Show me.”

And so she reached down and carefully clasped Alex’s wrist, barely keeping her eyelids open as they fell in line with each other. Before long, teeth were nipped against her thundering pulse; the rain and the fire drowned out in the white noise rushing through her ears. 

She settled back, limp against the coat, and slid her hand up to weakly squeeze Alex’s elbow. As she opened her eyes, she saw that Alex had her lower lip caught between her teeth, the flames licking over her pleased expression. 

Yes, she was owned. Even just for tonight. 

Afterwards, draped in a blanket that Maggie retrieved from the stable office and beaten most of the dust from, they enjoyed the dancing shadows of the crackling fire. 

“Is this stress too?” she asked, lightly tracing the shell of Alex’s ear.

“No. This just hit me.” Alex suppressed a smile. “Harder than you hit that pantry shelf.”

She groaned softly at the painful memory. She shifted her other hand, clenching it in and out as it had gone to sleep. “Yeah I really hit it.”

Alex hummed, shuffling closer and looping an arm around her waist. She reached up and combed her fingers through red hair, wondering why she felt peaceful. She had rarely slept with people under such impulsive circumstances, yet she figured since she knew now that Alex was no villain, it took the sting and danger from her attraction, leaving the proverbial gate wide open. 

The millionaire broke her chain of thought. “We can’t lie here all night.” 

The coat beneath them had crumpled in their activities, and hay was beginning to scratch and stick to her ribs. Maggie wrinkled her nose. “Yeah it’s starting to itch.”

“Come on.” Alex got up, wiping her body of any errant hay, and reached for her discarded bra. 

“Where are we going?”

“To bed.”

Maggie’s mouth dropped open as she watched Alex continue dressing. “What- to- your  _ bedroom _ ?”

“Yeah.” Seeing Maggie still awestruck, Alex smiled and leaned in to give her a kiss. “Much comfier. No hay.”

_ All gay without the hay _ , Maggie thought, following her to her feet. 

They dressed, patted down the horses’ noses and stoked at the fire. Then, sharing Alex’s coat they braved the storm, chasing towards the estate house. The thunder rumbled above them, wind gusting around as their uneven pace pushed them together. 

They reached the kitchen, breathless and dripping with rain. Thankfully, the coat bore the brunt of the elements. Sneaking in, Maggie noted, was a lot less complicated than it had been the night she had gone in search for Annex A. And with Alex, it didn’t feel illegal, yet there was still a thrill. 

They snuck into Alex’s bedroom. Maggie couldn’t make out much in the dark, except for the silhouette outline of a four poster. Alex pulled down the sheets, stripped down and slid into bed. 

“Sleep as well as you can. Everything else can be figured out in the morning.”

Maggie stripped but hovered, unsure. Alex turned towards her in the dark. 

“Don’t be shy,” she teased, patting at the mattress. “Get in.”

So she did.

~

People often talked about the calm before the storm. Given the clashes between opposing protestors in the streets of National City before the wind and rain beat down and forced everyone back inside, Maggie wasn’t sure she agreed that the statement fit the previous day’s events. 

But the post-storm clarity, the peace and sunshine, she could happily agree with. 

As wild as the events of the previous night had evolved into, when she woke up she wasn’t disorientated in the slightest. The sunrise came in through a tiny slip in the curtains, illuminating the arm of the person spooned against her. She traced the muscles for a few seconds, waiting for regret to hit. 

It never did. 

As she rolled onto her back, Alex rolled too, shifting on her pillow, but slipping straight back into sleep. Maggie watched the micro-twitches as she dreamt, presumably consumed even in slumber with the lead-up to the Expo. 

She dusted a light kiss to Alex’s cheek, then managed to dress and sneak out before Yvonne and her assistant arrived in the kitchen to prepare breakfast. She first checked on the horses, feeding them and promising to return later - either to perform her duties or clarify whether an outside stablehand would come in now that her ruse was up. 

Then she shot off a quick text to Alex, her equivalent of the note on the pillow, telling her that she had a great time the previous night and that she was in the cabin if she was needed. She also added that she understood Alex would be snowed under that day, given the Expo’s final preparations. She wouldn’t feel a cold shoulder if Alex didn’t have time in her packed schedule to pay attention to her…

As Maggie stepped under the hot spray, she wondered how to finish that sentence. Lover? One night stand? Friend that she enjoyed some very new benefits with? She wasn’t sure. 

By the time she stepped back into her bedroom to dress, Alex had replied, saying that she would be in touch that afternoon to arrange something.

_ No pressure _ , she replied. 

After breakfast, she lay down on the couch and ended up napping off into a dreamless sleep. She woke up to a ringing in her ears. With a groan, she grabbed her phone and answered. 

“Hello-”

_ “Maggie, we’ve tracked the van back into the city!” _

At Winn’s startling tone, she gunned straight up, kicking a pillow off the couch in her haste. “What?”

_ “We set up an electric scanner outside the Expo centre and it picked up the numberplate.” _

She rubbed the heel of her palm into her eyes. “Shit.” She froze at the thought of Alex at the centre. 

_ Alex.  _

_ “We’re tracking them through the city.” _ Maggie got up and searched for her bike keys. “If that’s the vehicle targeting aliens-”

“Then they might be hunting.” The keys jingled as she snatched them from the kitchen counter. “I’m on my way.”

She ended the call and went for her shoes, then her jacket. She had one sleeve on as she opened the door and found Kara with her fist raised. 

“Hi.”

“Hi,” Maggie said, surprised. She shrugged on her other sleeve. 

Kara looked at the keys in her hand. “Are you going into the city?”

“Yeah.” 

“Let me grab the Ducati!” Kara said, backtracking towards the path. “I’ll come too!”

“Isn’t that your sister’s bike?”

“Yeah.”

“Can’t you just…?” Maggie pointed up into the sky, but Kara had already disappeared into a kick of gravel. Seconds later, there was a roar of an engine. 

She didn’t have enough time to think about it. She went to her Triumph, threw a leg over, and put on her helmet. She rode to the gate, where Kara was waiting to greet her with a rev of the Ducati. The guard opened the gates, and they were racing towards National City. 

Half way through the suburbs, Kara indicated for them to pull in at a parking lot for a fast food chain.

“You should lead the rest of the way,” she said, “I just realised I don’t know where we’re going.”

“To my office. My friends are working on the case,” she said, voice strained over the muffle of her helmet and the two engines. 

“Alright.”

She was about to pull back when she noticed Kara’s attention fixed on a poster advertising a huge bucket of fried chicken for a family to share. Suddenly, Annex A made sense. The extra pantry, all of that food: all to feed a ravenous alien. 

Maggie shouted, “Come on!” 

When they pulled up to the building that held Maggie’s office, Winn was ready with a spare helmet. He jumped on the back of her bike. James zoomed from the parking lot underground to join them.

“We’ve got a tracker loaded on my smart watch.” He struggled to be heard over the three engines. “We’re gonna track them to see if they make any stops.” He shoved his helmet on, then jammed his finger forward as if she were a knight he was instructing to charge. 

For weeks, Maggie had had no luck in this case. She had chased leads, analysed documents, and even went undercover, all in the name of figuring out why a millionaire’s name was in the pockets of four aliens who had been killed and left on the streets to be found. 

Now, Maggie had all the luck in the world. And as luck would have it, they found the van parked, with its rear doors open on a quiet back street in the industrial part of town. As they brought their bikes to a stop, two black-clad figures were dragging a wriggling third figure between them. 

“Stop, stop!” the figure cried, kicking his heels against the pavement, “Please, stop, please, let me go!”

“Hey!” James yelled, ripping off his helmet. The two black-clad figures froze. “Who the hell are-”

Kara abandoned the Ducati and rushed towards them. The two figures dropped the person they were attempting to abduct, backing off. One of them, slightly taller than the other, brought a device from their back pocket and threw it onto the ground. 

It exploded into tendrils of blue electric current, forcing them all back lest they be electrocuted. The perpetrators took this opportunity to get back in their van, screeching off down the deserted street, the back doors of the van swinging and banging back. 

As the shocks fizzled away, Maggie slinked over to Kara and put a hand on her shoulder. “Hey, you alright?”

“Yeah.” She squeezed her eyes open and closed. “It was bright but I’m fine.”

James was posed like he might sprint down the street, motorcycle keys gripped in his fist. “Should we go after them?”

As the four of them stood deciding, Maggie became aware of another sound: the figure wheezing on the ground. She turned to get her first real look at him; he seemed to be having an anxiety attack. She knelt down beside him and clasped his bicep lightly. 

“Hey, you’re okay, we’ve got you.”

And at that moment, kneeling on a dusty tarmac road in National City, she realised; they had got him. They’d saved him.

Five victims she couldn’t save or couldn’t yet get justice for, but now? 

She had  _ saved _ one.

~

They find out that the alien’s name is Livtoonga, though he chose to go by Peter on Earth to avoid drawing too much unwanted attention from hostile humans. As he said this, his voice cracked, shaken up by the attempted abduction. He had eyes which were an otherworldly shade of green, and which shone with tears as they led him to get coffee from a street vendor. 

The four of them huddled on a nearby bus shelter, sipping their cheap coffee. The taste was terrible, but it was as bitter as the experience and that was enough. 

“You alright?” Maggie asked. 

“Yeah I- I think so.” Peter ran a hand through his short crop of white hair. To Maggie, he couldn’t have been old enough to graduate high school. “Who were those guys?”

With a subtle shake of the head, Kara indicated that she thought it was a bad idea to scare Peter, and Maggie agreed. “We were just here at the right time.”

Winn chose that moment to produce something from his pocket. It was a flat ID card with a name and photograph on it. Along with information like date of birth and employee ID, it had something embossed at the bottom: PROJECT CADMUS. 

“I picked this up. They dropped it as they escaped,” he said. Maggie suspected he also had the electric shocker stashed in his satchel, no doubt to take it apart and examine it later. “Ever heard of it?”

“No.” She flipped it over and back, but no other details stood out to her. She slipped it into the pocket of her jacket, where it rustled against her list of the five victims. “We’ll take it home.”

“I actually-” A nervous Peter stood up from the bus shelter seat abruptly. He seemed unsteady on his feet. “Oh shit.” 

“Woah, woah,” Maggie said, putting a gentle hand on his elbow. “Take it easy.”

“I told someone I would meet them, I need to get a cab-”

“Alex Danvers has cancelled her meeting.” 

He went dead still at the name, eyes like saucers swinging towards her. “Wait, what?”

“Alex won’t contact you for a while,” Kara said. 

“Why?” This panicked him, the styrofoam cup squeezing in his hand. “Is something wrong?”

“We’re scared that…” Maggie pulled up short, realising with a pang that it was not their place to reveal any stalking or data breach. 

Luckily, Winn cooked up an explanation very quickly: “There’s a lot of bad alien-haters out there right now. So she’s just…”

“Just having a temporary suspension to protect everyone,” James said, backing him up. 

Peter didn’t seem convinced by this, but he was pale and shaken up, and happy enough to take these four strangers at their word. 

They made sure he got home safely. He paused at his front door and gave them a weak wave, then went inside. After this, Maggie brought the ID card out of her jacket. 

“Project Cadmus.” She handed it to James. “Who do we think is behind it?”

“I don’t know,” Winn said, peering over his shoulder. “We’ll start on the case when we get back to your office.”

After a polite goodbye, she was left with Kara, who gave off the impression of a wind-up toy who had expelled her fun and was waiting for the next key turn. 

“Oh! Before I forget!” She bounced on her toes, rifling through her jacket. “I was coming to the cabin to give you something.”

“Oh?”

Kara retrieved a little slip of card. “Alex said you should meet her here.”

_ “Oh?” _ Maggie repeated, her tone dropping an octave. She took the card, which had a neat scrawl on the back. “See, we-”

“I don’t want to know,” Kara jibbed, swinging her leg over the Ducati. She beamed, even as her cheeks blossomed with embarrassment, “But know that I’ll find out anyway.”

While Maggie wasn’t the type to boost or be lewd about her romantic exploits, she similarly didn’t find herself often self-conscious about them. But watching Kara’s retreating figure, she couldn’t help but feel just a smidge red-faced at the prospect that she and Alex hadn’t been as subtle sneaking in and out of the house as they had hoped. 

The scrawl on the back was an address in a good part of town. A very expensive part of town. 

When she parked her bike outside the address, she found a looming, glossy block of apartments which towered above the banking district. The doorman didn’t seem surprised at her approach.

She didn’t come too close. He was built like a football player, easily a head and a half taller than her, dressed in a fine suit. He was every inch part of this luxury establishment. 

“Maggie Sawyer?” he asked. 

She wasn’t easily intimidated, but she was now. “Yes.”

“Miss Davners said to go on up.” He smiled and held out a white-gloved hand. “She said to take care of your motorcycle.”

She warily gave up her keys, then proceeded through the marble lobby towards an elevator bank which shone gold like a beacon. She got in, leaning back against the sparkling rail, wondering what the hell she had gotten herself into. 


	9. Chapter 9

The elevator pinged. Leaning against the wall right in front of her, hands deep in her pockets, was Alex. The wallpaper behind her was a deep, blood red, and Maggie’s stomach crushed in on itself. 

“Made it,” Alex said. She was dressed in pressed black slacks, and a crisp white shirt with the signature style of the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. Clearly, she had been wearing it as she worked at the Expo all day, and yet she still looked…

Maggie’s heartrate spiked. “Yeah.”

She stepped out of the elevator onto the padded carpet, feeling like she should take her boots off. The corridor was sparsely lined with doors; the apartments behind likely spacious beyond anything she had ever lived in. 

Alex pushed off the wall. She ran her teeth over her lower lip, considering, and then jerkily moved into a kiss. Maggie kissed her back, much more fluidly, breaking the tension that had simmered ever since that night in the barn. 

Pulling away, cheeks flushed, Alex led them towards the end of the corridor, going through the last door on the right. Maggie got the impression of being a character in a fantasy film; this was the first time she was through the magical portal into the brand new world, about to experience sights and sounds she could never conceive of before.

Clean cut glass, polished silver, matte black and glossy marble white; each inch of the furniture in the penthouse apartment looked straight out of a magazine. And yet it was warm in places, lamps emitting a yellow light that both highlighted the sharp edges and made them more appealing. 

“Take out?” Alex asked. 

“Sure,” Maggie said, turning in a slow circle.

“You like Chinese food?” She retrieved a tablet from the high, sleek kitchen bench and swiped through tabs. “I found this great place around the corner.”

She presented it to Maggie, who took it, their fingers not even brushing. As she paced forward, Alex paced back, and for the next few minutes they orbited each other. Alex looked relieved in the moments her phone went off and she had a distraction from all of the unspoken words bouncing off the pristine surfaces of her penthouse apartment. 

It took the initial few minutes of holding the tablet and waltzing through that distanced dance until Maggie really focused on the tablet. The interface was like no fast food website she had ever ordered from. The prices alone were impossible to fathom, nevermind the variety of dishes she browsed. 

“What do you-” Maggie stuttered, waving at the ornate graphic design. “Where do I even begin here?”

Alex cracked a smile at last, taking the tablet from her. This time their fingertips brushed slightly. “Anything you’re allergic to?”

“Nope.”

“Trust me?”

The flirty response relaxed some of the awkwardness in Maggie’s stature. “Now that I know all your secrets, sure.”

“Not all of them.” Alex looked up through her eyelashes. She pushed her hip in the direction of a plush living room area. “Relax. I’ll take care of this.”

Maggie slipped off her boots as she spied the doughy white rud in the palatial living room. She expected a chill on the bottom of her feet stepping onto the grey tiled kitchen, but was surprised at the warmth. Heated floors, she observed, then sidled across the plush carpet towards a navy chair in a curved bend. 

She circled it once, like an animal evaluating its chosen sleeping spot. It was stylish in the way that a sculpture in an art museum might be. She wasn’t sure it would be found in the IKEA catalogue and it certainly didn’t read as a cosy choice. 

However, when she lowered herself gingerly into the bend and sat back, she soon corrected her preconceptions. The quality was unrivaled, as if angels themselves were cradling her. 

Reclined, Maggie let her gaze roam to the slat-staircase leading up towards a second level. The space inside this penthouse could, she reckoned, fit her first four apartments inside. As Alex circled in the kitchen, tapping at a tablet, Maggie tried to imagine her hosting dinner parties, or friends, or even lovers here. 

Every so often Alex’s phone rang on the bench and she checked who it was, then went back to ordering their dinner. Maggie reassessed those early conversations, that day on the patio. Alex had dodged the implication that she was too busy to date, even before she was CEO, though she hadn’t denied it. 

She also remembered Alex’s reaction to Maggie’s sexuality, as if she was a fish flailing against its hook. Although, she avoided analysing their trajectory too much, unwilling to admit that she had been the one who was caught and reeled in inch by inch until she was lying in a U-bend chair in a penthouse apartment in a part of town she never stopped in. 

Finally, Alex set the tablet back on the bench, and prowled over towards where Maggie was. She took a seat on an adjacent couch, rubbing her palms on her knees. “So…”

Maggie pushed up on her heels, feeling silly now in the low chair. “We should talk-”

“Not before ribs.”

Maggie saw the seriousness of Alex’s nerves then. She let herself slip back down, relenting. “Not before ribs.”

Alex let out a long breath. Her hands released their grip on her knees. “Kara called me and said you saved someone tonight.”

“Kara definitely did the saving. I just did the ‘getting home safely’ part.” She wormed a hand into her pocket for the ID card left behind and flicked it over onto the couch. “Ever heard of Project Cadmus?”

“No,” Alex said, scooping up the ID and inspecting it. “I don’t recognise this guy, either way.”

Her phone blared for attention from the kitchen counter, and with a sigh she got up to answer. Maggie made a decision to get up too before she became a mere extension of the chair. She wandered over to the floor to ceiling windows and surveyed the twinkling lights of the city. 

In the time it took for their food to arrive, Alex ended up fielding a dozen texts and calls ahead of the opening of the Expo the next day, meaning they never got to speak until they were sitting at the wide kitchen table. 

Alex began lifting packets out of white bags. Maggie couldn’t help but be impressed by the quality of the spread; there were no grease stains here, the presentation and packaging were immaculate. 

“Do you mind if I practice my opening speech for tomorrow night’s dinner?” Alex asked, pulling out a chair for Maggie and then going to a cupboard. 

Maggie looked at the food, then at the chair. “Yeah, sure.”

As Alex cracked each of the lids for the dishes and spooned out portions onto each of their plates, she worked through the history of research in the company, the launch of Renutia, the regeneration of memory cells, where this breakthrough could lead medical machinery in the future. She paused only to hold up a bottle of red wine and another of white, continuing as Maggie pointed to the red. 

She didn’t falter until she was sitting down to eat. “Like my father always-” Her voice wavered, so she cleared it, and pressed forward with more determination. She pulled her plate close and gestured with her fork. “Like my father always said, if it works, it sells, the rest takes care of itself….” 

Then quiet. The thing about having a penthouse apartment so far up was that they were so far from any noise. In the expectant stillness, Alex flinched as her cutlery clicked against the ceramic plate. 

Maggie remembered the scientist she had watched, who had been so confident when discussing her lab and projects, yet had faltered when asked about the legacy of her father. She thought about that day when she and Alex had taken the horses for a short ride and she had heard about the pain from Jeremiah’s sudden death. 

Before she could really rein in her sensibilities, Maggie said, “He’d be proud of you.” 

Alex’s expression was pained as she raised her head from her plate. 

“I didn’t know him or…” Maggie clasped her napkin, blundering on. “But I know, the work you’re doing, I’m sure he’d be proud.”

Still somewhat stung, Alex contemplated the assurance, all while Maggie cursed herself for not keeping her mouth shut. 

Then, a sad utterance: “I’m not sure he would be.”

Maggie put down the napkin. “Alex, when you reveal Renutia at the Expo, everyone is gonna know that it’ll change the lives of millions. Return a quality of life to so many patients and families. Restore  _ dignity _ to people who didn’t choose to lose it. Who wouldn’t be proud of that?”

Alex said nothing to this, swallowing and then focusing on her plate. They ate in silence for a few minutes, and then she leaned back, swilling her wine around the glass. “You know looking back…” 

“Yeah?”

A smile twitched at her face. “Maybe part of asking you to trial the helmet was me just trying to spend time with you.”

Maggie grinned at the switch. “Oh yeah? Luring me down to your lair. Seduce me with your science.”

“Shut up.”

The grief dissipated as they shared a laugh. It was the closest they had come to discussing  _ them _ , Maggie noted. 

But rather than chase down that particular alleyway, Maggie let herself fade into the aromas and tastes of the top class food she had in front of her. When they were done, the plates were cleared into a normal dishwasher, which she couldn’t help but find ironic.

“I think I have the same model in my apartment,” Maggie said.

Alex bent down to stack the plates into the tray. “Are you surprised?”

“No I guess…” She handed over some cutlery, which Alex clattered into the holder. “I expected something high tech.”

Alex snorted, clicking a tab into the dispenser. “The high tech dishwasher market isn’t very advanced or developed.”

She pushed the dishwasher closed as she stood up. The dinner and wine had relaxed her, now that the initial nervousness of being alone together had passed. Her cheeks held an alluring shade of rosy pink, and through a lidded gaze she leaned closer.

Her phone blared again. With a huff of annoyance, she went to it. 

Drawn back to the window, Maggie couldn’t believe the view from so high; she could barely see the nighttime traffic below. If this was what the rich and powerful saw every night before they slept, no wonder they acted as arrogantly as they did.

Having dealt with the call, Alex appeared at her side, staring out. “We’ve had our ribs, now.”

“We have. They were good.”

Even in the murky reflection of the window, Maggie could see the worry in Alex’s face. The city lights flickered around them on glass and matte surfaces both warm and cool at the same time. 

“I’ll go-”

“So I thought-”

Alex twitched as they spoke at once, smiling weakly. She turned to the solid glass coffee table, set down her wine, they lay her hands out in invitation. “You.”

Maggie leaned a shoulder against the glass, half expecting it to fall through and send her falling to her death. She cast her mind back to the day that Alex had returned home, leather and swagger, grabbing her attention. 

“I didn’t expect this, Alex. You’re obviously smart, gorgeous, bratty at times…” At this, Alex grinned and sipped her wine. “You’re...amazing.”

Alex cocked her head. “But?”

Maggie nodded for her to sit, and then sat beside her on the couch, figuring out how to phrase what she wanted to say. “ _ But,  _ we don’t order takeout from the same part of town.”

“I didn’t always order takeout from this part of town.” It was a quiet rebuttal; trying not to be persistent or persuasive but  _ trying _ nonetheless. 

“You do now, though, and that’s…”

Alex looked at her very seriously with her lips pursed, then she leaned in and kissed Maggie slow and deep, like she owned her; like she was a gift to unwrap and savour. As she pulled back, Maggie’s pulse thumped in her throat.

“But there’s that,” Alex whispered, breath tickling her lips.

“Yeah,” she breathed. 

Alex reached over for her hand and laced their fingers together, the gesture feeling to Maggie like the most intimate thing they had shared. “When we were sitting in that kitchen, I just- I- maybe it’s because J’onn had told me you were trying to figure out how we were connected to the four victims, but I already felt a connection with you.”

Maggie bumped her elbow. “That’s creepy, that you guys knew the whole time,” 

“We wanted to do a reverse snoop.” With her free hand, Alex swiped at the back of her neck. “We could follow you into the alien community, where we really couldn’t access, and see what connections you could make.”

Considering their luxuries, how removed they were from lower society, it made sense. Not only would Alex run the risk of being recognised, but they would also have no roads into the working class alien communities of National City. 

Undeterred, Alex continued, “Anyway, I felt a connection. I just didn’t realise it was, y’know, a  _ gay _ connection.” 

Her eyes flicked up to gauge reaction at the admission, then skittered away again. “I’ve never met anyone like you before, Maggie.” She played her knuckles gently against Maggie’s, a sort of half-muffled shake. “I’ve definitely never done anything like that before.”

In a flashflood of memory, Maggie got caught up in the storm, the nerves, the rush, the instinct, but these came alongside the brazenness, the boldness, the passion which more than made up for any fumbling or minor corrections. 

“But?” Maggie prompted. 

“But…” She fiddled with the stem of her wine glass. “I used to find myself wanting to run away sometimes. To find something that was missing in my life. Maybe what I was looking for was inside me all...along.” 

She made a face at the phrasing, but Maggie couldn’t help but shift closer. “I get it.”

She leaned in and kissed Alex with no questions and no answers, sweetening her next sentence; “We shouldn’t make any decisions until after the Expo.”

“You’re right.”

The conclusion of the conversation didn’t hold any weight. They had both settled down on the couch, closing the book on the conversation, for now, at least. 

If it weren’t for Alex’s phone going off three more times between refills of their glasses, they could have shared each other’s company. At one point, Maggie found herself back at the window, looking up into the hazy black sky, wondering where the stars were amongst the light pollution. 

Alex slinked over with Maggie’s refilled glass of wine. She tasted Alex’s lips before the wine, the alcohol heating her blood. She slid her hands along the curve of Alex’s spine, pressing their bellies together, enjoying the disgruntled noise of someone having to hold two glasses of wine instead of sinking into a kiss. 

“I’m still on shift,” Alex said with a sly smirk, handing over the wine and slipping away again. 

However, on the next circulation back, she seemed more sombre. “I’m still thinking.”

“Oh?”

“Would- I mean-I know we said no decisions until after the Expo-” She set down her glass and flapped her hands anxiously. “I’m a big girl Maggie, if you don’t want me, I can handle it. Maybe it’s just a fling for you, or exciting, or-”

“Have I made it seem like I don’t want you?”

Alex blinked. “No.”

Maggie set her glass alongside Alex’s. “Have I?”

She didn’t wait for an answer, her fingertips curling around Alex’s wrist and pressing on her pulse. She pulled her in, Alex’s lips messily falling against her. Any uncertainty breezed away in a hungry kiss, as she was spun and pushed against the glass. She gasped at the cold against her back and Alex took the opportunity to slide her tongue just over her bottom lip. 

And then Alex took her hand and led her towards the slat stairs, up towards the second level. While their romp in the stables had been pure passion, this was pure class. Immersed in all of the treasures that money could buy - top of the range sheets, pillows, mattress - only heightened everything: the smell of Alex’s shampoo, the taste and feel of her skin, their bodies reflecting the lights of the city shining in like artificial stars. 

It may not have had the spontaneity of the first time, but it had double the electricity. 

And, also unlike the romp in the stables, she slept soundly afterwards without having to hastily change locations. 

She woke up with the sunrise, the rays reflecting off of the tall building opposite. She slipped Alex’s white shirt on, and then sat on the edge of the bed. The bedroom area was similarly tidy and minimal to downstairs; a tall wardrobe loomed in the corner, there were essentials on a matching black dresser. While there was top-range quality, there was no excess. 

With a yawn and a shift of the bed, two bare legs swang on either side of her and a warm body folded around her back. Alex kissed the side of her neck. 

“Morning,” she grumbled. 

She slipped her arms around Maggie’s waist. She indulged it, being held, in this luxurious apartment. She took a deep breath in and felt the blood thick with contentment swirl up into her head, then she released it.

She lifted her cup of proverbial cold water, and with dispiritedness, tipped it up to shock them back to reality. 

“Ready for today?”

Alex’s whole body went rigid, before she completely withdrew. Maggie looked over her shoulder as she pulled her knees up to her chest. 

“Facing investors. Facing all of the press…” She ran a hand through her mussed red hair. “I just want to rush past that and focus on the science.”

Maggie crawled over and kissed her. “You’ll be fine.”

Rather than refute or concede the point, she pulled Maggie back down into bed. She was happy to be made a distraction, for now. 

After another tumble through the sheets and trying to work out how the fancy high-pressure shower worked, she found that her clothes had been taken from the floor. She pinched the white towel tighter around her as Alex climbed the stairs with a bundle in her arms. 

“Where are my clothes?”

“I’ve sent them with Henrietta to be cleaned for you.” Alex set down a white-paper wrapped package. “I hope these will do.”

Maggie stepped over and opened the white tissue paper, finding a brand new flannel, white tank top, pair of jeans, underwear and socks neatly folded on top of each other. 

“How did you know my size?” She fingered at the tags, seeing the same stores that she would have bought her original clothes in. “How did you get clothes so fast?”

“I have my ways.” Alex teased, then turned back to descend down the stairs. “I didn’t want to have you doing the walk of shame in the same outfit.”

It wasn’t until Maggie was sitting downstairs on the couch waiting for Alex’s state of the art coffee maker to brew that it all sunk in. She was in fresh, new clothes, in an apartment that was worth a figure she was scared to guess, having slept with one of National City’s richest women. 

“Penny for your thoughts?” 

A steaming cup appeared in front of her face. It smelled exquisite.

Maggie took the cup and gently waved it towards  _ National City Sunrise _ , the city’s most watched local breakfast show. “That’s as wide as I am tall.”

“It was Kara’s choice.” Alex sat down on the couch beside her. “She makes me watch musicals on it any chance she gets.”

Maggie was amused at the thought of them watching musicals on the huge TV screen. Brimming with affection, she placed a hand on Alex’s thigh and squeezed. Enjoying top of the range coffee, they talked about everything; Kara being an alien, her move from Midvale High when their family got rich, workout routines, science even. 

The Expo would begin with Alex hosting a dinner for main investors and vendors at 7, and she didn’t have to be there until noon, so they felt no time pressure. 

“Hey,” Maggie said after a few minutes, “I had a nice time last night.”

Alex grinned. “Much better when it’s not on a stack of hay.”

The smiley presenters passed over to a colleague for the news bulletins, and the cheery atmosphere turned sour. The news reporter announced that there was a major demonstration planned for the afternoon.

“Not her,” Alex hissed, as none other than Lillian Luthor’s face appeared on screen.

A report detailed how a huge anti-alien rally was going to be held in the city. Likely, a lot of downtown would be closed off from 1pm, when the rally was scheduled to kick off. With each word the reporter churned out, the blood drained further from Alex’s face. 

Maggie could see her swinging between despondency and panic in real time. “Don’t worry, it’ll disperse before the Expo.”

“Even if it does, with people going home, this city could be gridlocked for hours after.” Alex took a slug of coffee, then gritted her teeth. “This is Lillian, again,” she complained, “Always just trying to…”

As her eyes fell to the coffee table, Maggie spied her personal items gathered together. Likely taken from her clothes when Henrietta took them to be cleaned. Her phone, her purse, and the ID card that she had collected last night were neatly piled together. 

She picked up the ID and spun it, looking up at Lillian on the TV screen giving more details of the demonstrations. 

Five alien victims. 

Massive brain trauma. 

Neuro-Connect. 

She stopped spinning the ID. “Wait…”

Alex made a noise in her throat, attention riveted to the screen.

“Lillian Luthor…” she said, “We’ve been asking this whole time, who killed the aliens and why? Acting like they’re the targets.”

She sat up straighter. Threads of memories began to unravel in her head. Things that made sense no longer did, and things that never did was suddenly clear as day. It was as if she had opened a book just to watch the words dance around and resettle in completely different places. 

Alien victims were not targets. They were victims of scientific exploitation - just like her original theory. But it wasn’t Alex. 

It was someone anti-alien. 

Heading into a demonstration on the day of the Expo. 

“Alex, what if the whole time, the target was you?”

Alex spluttered, ripping her gaze from the TV. “Uh, what?”

Maggie was on her feet now, excited strides cushioned by the white plush carpet. “Neuro-Connect launching. This all building up ahead of your first Expo as CEO. Attacks against the aliens you worked with.”

“Wait, we don’t-” Alex’s eyes bugged as she looked up at Maggie. “We don’t have enough proof for that.”

“Think about it.” 

Maggie dug her thumb into the ID card. Project Cadmus. She remembered seeing the prototype of Neuro-Connect on the news, the way the headdress was styled on a person’s head. She thought about the Renutia helmet. 

If there was a data breach which targeted the aliens who had come to Alex for help, trying to pin the murders on her, then what other information had been stolen?

She smacked her palm to her forehead. 

“When I researched your company, I read a lot of analysis,” Maggie explained, “Some of it talked about the battle between you, LuthorCorp and Lord Technologies to be the top tech dog in National City. Your share price has been unshakeable over the last few years with each of your products...no doubt Renutia would follow the same pattern.”

Alex was on her feet now too. “But none of the people who were targeted and killed were involved in Renutia trials.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Maggie held out the ID card and pointed at the TV. As if she had timed it, they were showing a throwback to the previous announcement of Neuro-Connect, completely with the headdress prototype. “There’s been some kind of data breach along the way, and they’ve used that to race ahead of you. They want you to fail.”

“I don’t know Maggie. I can’t prove any of that.”

But she had planted a seed, she could see Alex’s brain working, suspicion growing. There was no proof: but after so much time sitting in the dark, it was like clicking on a torch and waving a beam around. 

The bodies may not be the singular string of crimes she had thought they were, but potentially connected to a wider conspiracy. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t tried to widen this much further than the Danvers. 

“You’re being framed, Alex,” Maggie said, “The deaths connected to your work, the stirring of anti-alien tensions to intimidate those you work with, the pushing of an agenda which seeks to scare and terrorise aliens.” She waved the ID card. “Neuro-Connect being announced before your first Expo as CEO.” 

Alex made for her phone, then her coffee, then the TV remote, and eventually just threw her hands up uselessly. “What do I do?”

“We have to start again. We have to count the deaths as a symptom, not as the main focus.” Maggie stopped pacing, looking at the TV, where the smiley presenters were momentarily back. “If the alien victims were selected, not stalked, then there has been data stolen from your servers. Which means the plans for the helmet could be.”

“The technology, the research I did with J’onn.” Alex’s shoulders lowered as a cool wave of anger passed over her. “Could that research have been stolen and used for Neuro-Connect?”

“If they stole your data and failed to replicate it exactly in their trials…” Maggie felt like she was staring into a clear blue lagoon which had previously been a muddy riverbed. Suddenly she could see the fish, the greenery, the life teaming inside. “Then that could explain the massive brain injuries.”

“Oh my-” Alex palmed the back of her neck. “If I give your friend Winn access to our servers, could he see if there was a data breach?”

“He could try.”

A crimson BREAKING NEWS banner flashed onto the TV screen:  _ Fights break out between commuters downtown at anti-alien rally point. _

“Fights? It’s not even 9am!” Alex exclaimed. 

The anchor directed the attention to a feed from a helicopter showing a mass of people at Belmont Park, where the anti-alien rally was expected to be held. A van with the LuthorCorp logo was parked beside an area where a stage was already being assembled.

A reporter, his microphone muffled, gave commentary on the pictures:  _ “Uh...it looks like two people have been critically injured here, Jeff. Possibly a shooting or a stabbing.” _

The anchor sounded as surprised as Maggie felt:  _ “Shooting? At this time of the morning? _ ”

_ “That’s what it looks like, Jeff. At this time in the commute, as well.” _

The feed zoomed in and showed emergency crews attending two patients, a hefty amount of bloody tissue and equipment strewn around them. 

_ “The set up for the demonstration has been halted here at Belmont Park...It’s likely it may be cancelled altogether, Jeff.” _

As the camera panned to some of the other bystanders, some of the clearly not human, Maggie’s mind was already pacing through the implications. 

Had an alien attacked two humans in broad daylight during the busy morning commute? Would that be how they would spin the narrative?

“Shit,” she breathed.

Alex didn’t reply, sitting heavily on the couch. 


	10. Chapter 10

After weeks away from her office, she was looking forward to being back. She had warned Winn that it had better be in the state it was when she left to take the stablehand job. He responded with a deluge of emojis. 

She thanked the barista and carefully lifted the cardboard holder, the four cups heavy and swaying in her palm. She used to come here every day to grab coffee as she worked through cases, and the smells and sounds - even seeing the same staff after the past few weeks - felt like going back to normal. 

Yet the cafe was just across from the university, and when she exited just in front of the large  _ Danvers Bio-Solutions _ billboard, she was acutely aware that not everything was back to normal. 

She trudged up the four flights of stairs, eyes riveted to any spilled coffee on the porcelain-coloured lids. She was glad to see the office door open, able to walk in and set the cardboard holder straight on her desk. She presented a latte to James, who thanked her with a warm smile.

Winn bounced out of his seat immediately. “Caffeine, sweet caffeine!” He wiggled out his cappuccino, then pouted. “No pastries?”

She gave him an incredulous look which had him scampering back to his seat. He had built a fortress of monitors, harddrives stacked upright on their sides like a bookshelf, cables winding around like a swampy moat.

It wasn’t neat, she scowled, but it would be necessary for this afternoon. 

She rounded the desk and sat in her chair. The last time she had been here, she had been reciting her false details in preparation for the stablehand interview. She couldn’t help but smile now; with J’onn being psychic the entire time, there was no chance a lie would have slipped past him. 

Between sips of her own black coffee, she explained the current situation and her running theories. James savoured his latte, nodding his head thoughtfully. Winn paced, emphasised by the confined space, and she realised it had probably been a bad idea to feed him more caffeine. 

“Which is why Alex suggested you-” She eventually lost her temper. “Hey! Can you stop pacing?”

“I’m not a forensic cyber analyst, Maggie,” he said, shrugging his shoulders near his ears. “I’m probably going to miss something!”

While she could understand the pressure on him, she also knew that he had the tendency to be unaware of just how brilliant he was. If there had been data breaches in the system, he was the one who would find them. 

“You’ll be fine.”

As if cued, Kara poked her head into the doorway. “I’ve found the right place, huh?”

She came in holding a huge black server under her arm like a football. Maggie could only imagine the glances she attracted on the way in. She set it down heavily, then smacked her palms together. Maggie took the last coffee in the holder and held it out. 

“Alex told me your order.”

Kara’s eyes lit up as she took the sugary frappuccino. “Thanks!”

She lifted the cup to her lips with one hand, and set a neatly folded piece of paper on the desk with the other. Maggie unfolded it, seeing neatly written sequences of letters and numbers which made no discernible sense to her. Crypto keys, she guessed, and waved them in Winn’s direction. 

Alex had agreed to give him access to a network server to establish whether there was a data breach or not; and determine just how deep it had gone into their systems. 

But like a boy with a new toy, he was circling the Network Attached Server. It was up to his shins, and he bent almost perpendicular to study it. 

“This is one of your backups?” he asked. 

Kara nodded emphatically. “It has data from the whole year. We’re hoping that’s the timeframe we can work within.”

His eyes bugged as he studied where the peripheral connections would click into. “Look at this…” He looked up at his fortress of technology sitting idle in the corner. Maggie could see the squint in his face as he calculated that none of the cables would reach.

There were blue lights on the front, Maggie noted. As if she could hear, Kara swung a satchel from her shoulder and wiggled a power cord. “It’s been running on a battery, but we should probably get it connected to power, in case it dies.”

After a pathetic attempt to bend at the knees and lift the heavy black box, Winn mumbled, “Can I get a little help?”

Maggie snickered while Kara lifted the NAS as if it were an empty cardboard box and placed it where Winn pointed her to. 

Maggie took that opportunity to reach below her desk to where she had set her laptop bag before going across the street for their coffees. She brought out her workstation and started catching up on emails she had missed. Even while she was undercover, alien contacts were getting in touch with unrelated tips and queries, and she set to work drafting a template to send to them all explaining her delay. 

James was also hunched over his laptop, watching reels of the CCTV footage that Alex had provided both from outside the estate and the front of the exhibition centre. He was sketching quick notes at each point that the now familiar white van appeared. Alex had thrown in some footage from the main downtown  _ DBS _ facility on top, but so far no scouring had flagged anything of interest there. 

With Maggie and James buried in their laptops and Winn tangling himself up in connecters to the NAS, Kara floated in the middle. She seemed to want to help, but was too awkward to ask, fiddling with the sticky lid of the frap where the foam had dried. 

“You got a good data plan on your phone?” Maggie asked.

Kara blinked. “Yeah, it’s pretty good.”

“Here.” She kicked out a spare chair, scrawled some details on a post-it, and slid it over. “Get googling.”

Kara did well to tamper down on her excitement, but she still practically hopped over. “Alright.”

They settled into quiet concentration, clicking at their keyboards, their conversation sparse. Their study lasted long enough that James stood up with a stretch and went on another coffee run. On the basis that she was craving something sugary, Kara agreed to go with him. 

“You got some shades or a hat? You might get recognised,” James said, “Seeing as you’re rich and famous, even if you’re sister is the business one.”

Kara shrugged. “I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

As they left, Winn spun in his desk chair, raised his eyes, then turned back to his work. 

Barely ten minutes after they had returned however, he shot straight up in his seat, catching the attention of everyone else in the room. Spindles of code were racing down the screen on his portal, until it stopped with a declarative beep. 

“You had a data breach,” he said, inching closer to read the final code lines. Then he gave the NAS a gentle tap on the side. “You were  _ definitely _ hacked.”

“Did our security teams miss that?” Kara asked, setting down her mobile. 

“Sometimes Red teams miss things, sometimes Blue teams miss things…” He twirled in his chair, grabbing and batting upwards as if the malware was above him. “And sometimes they stitch up the hole they tore in your security systems, so that by the time you check, it’s like there was no one there in the first place.”

Rather than react to that news, Kara did a double-take at the board behind Maggie. She flittered between the victim’s photographs, the autopsy reports, the loops and lines of red marker connecting them. 

“The first victim was in the desert, three were in the city, then the last was at our house…” She took off her glasses, staring at the board as if she could see the very elements within it. Perhaps, Maggie thought, she could. “Why?”

“Random? The last one a taunt?” James suggested, “Obviously someone has tried to stitch you up.”

“But what if…” Kara nibbled her lower lip, then got up and reached for the whiteboard marker clipped to the steel frame. She motioned as if to move it. “Can I?”

Maggie turned in her desk chair and nodded. Kara flipped the white board to the clean side. She wrote three victims together with their names, then the fifth to the right, and the first on its own. 

“What if…” She boxed the name Jennifer Go, the first victim, separating it from the others. “Do you know if the cops searched anywhere around the desert? They didn’t tell us the full details when they first...alerted us.”

Kara’s tone darkened at the end, and Maggie remembered Alex’s masked despair in the back of the limo as she came clean, J’onn’s wavering between stoicism and shame as he recalled how the money and privilege of the family had protected them from being treated as criminals.  _ Who would care about dead aliens? _

Yet Kara seemed to crunch on the notion that they were tipped off by the very authorities who should have been rigorously examining them as suspects, even if they were ultimately innocent. 

Maggie shook her head. “No idea.” 

“What if the body was left nearby where they died.” She drew a straight line between the middle three names - Ageddis Aolin, Pobba Porra and Chantelle Ganez - further separating the first victim from the rest. 

“There was a contracted factory out in the desert, way at the beginning.” She drew a diagram of a simple rectangle with a roof and smoking chimney, squeaking smoke above it to signal its work. “After we moved to the city, just before Jeremiah died, it was bought by someone. I used to overhear business conversations.”

Maggie could imagine the cartoon smoke coming from the factory blackening and billowing into a real plume as she started to follow Kara’s line of thinking. “You’re suggesting someone could be working out of that?”

“It was an old factory, it was more for storage. But I think maybe some old equipment was there...I just…” 

“You think someone could be hiding out there?”

Behind Maggie, Winn and James left their seats and flanked each side, also following the train of thought. 

“Maybe they panicked that Jennifer Go’s body was discovered too close, and took the other three into the city?” James said. 

Maggie pushed her sleeves up to her elbows. “You remember who bought the lab?”

“No.” Kara closed her eyes, then raised her chin. “But I do remember Jeremiah and Eliza arguing about selling to competitors.”

Competitor. 

_ Competitor.  _

_ Luthor.  _

But, as Alex had warned, she had no concrete evidence to back up her theory. Yet. She wished they had access to a vehicle database, and could maybe find out the registered owner of the elusive white van. 

“How far away from the factory was the first body found?” she asked. 

Within thirty seconds, Kara had a location in the desert on her phone. A snaking blue line showed a short distance of about ten minutes drive between the location of the factory and the location of Jennifer’s body. Not far at all in that flat, shapeless area.

The coordinates were close enough to raise her suspicion, but still not a smoking gun. Her phone vibrated on the desk. She answered it absentmindedly. 

“Hey,” she said, still skittering between the victims’ names. 

_ “Maggie, four of our people have gone missing overnight.” _

It was M’gann. Her voice sent ice down the back of Maggie’s spine. She was stunned. 

“I-” She scrambled to compute what she had just heard. “ _ Four _ ?!”

_ “Including Stapha.”  _

Maggie covered her mouth. Kara, James and Winn were all staring, but she couldn’t acknowledge their concern. 

Stapha. 

Her ex. 

Her  _ alien _ ex. 

Would her name be next on the board? Maggie’s train of thought barrelled through all of the worst details of the last few weeks; Mrs Ganez’s grief, the autopsy reports, Peter’s terror at the attempted abduction, the media’s disdain for aliens.

_ “Maggie?” _

“Stapha?” she choked.

_ “Yeah. Her sister was going crazy in here. This is causing some real hysteria, Maggie.” _

She tilted her head as if to drain water from her ear, as if that might let her feel less like she was going under. “Okay...”

_ “The violence at that pro-alien rally. Two humans stabbed this morning, police suspect aliens. Now four more of our own are missing.” _

Four missing before the stabbings this morning meant that they couldn’t be retaliatory - they had to have been planned.

“Okay.” Her knees weak, Maggie rose to her feet. “I’m on it.”

_ “I know you are.” _

Maggie checked her watch: it was close to the time that the dinner which opened the Expo was due to begin. 

Triple beeps shouted from the corner of the room, causing all four of them to turn towards it. It was the tracker that Winn had been wearing the night they saved Peter. It had died and lost signal, but after charging had not picked up any trace that the van’s registration had been tracked by the city’s traffic camera network. 

Until now.

“My watch!” Winn vaulted over to where it had revived back to life. “The van’s been sighted!”

Maggie shut down her laptop lid and ended her call with M’gann without saying goodbye. She could message later. There were more important things to deal with. 

Winn had the watch almost up to his nose. “I think it’s heading out of the city.”

“James, Winn, go to the exhibition centre. Try and get J’onn and send him to the coordinates,” Maggie instructed, lifting her bike keys and motorcycle helmet.

“I’ll call ahead for you,” Kara said, “He’ll meet you at the front door.”

Maggie only paused to watch her produce a set of keys from her pocket. “Your sister’s Ducati?”

Kara smiled wryly. “Couldn’t fly here in the middle of the day, unless there’s crime or something.”

“The balaclava was a terrible disguise,” Winn said. He shrivelled under Maggie’s glare. 

But before he could squeak anything else, she stole the tracker from his grasp. 

“Let’s go.”

~

It was harder than she anticipated, following the GPS coordinates on the beeping watch while also snaking along the highway out of the city. 

As luck would have it, the van headed towards the desert, in the exact direction of the abandoned factory. They were lucky to be around twenty minutes behind the van; it gave them plenty of time to hang back and not tip off their suspects to their presence.

They dismounted their bikes where the GPS coordinates joined up. The endless sandy plains peeled away to reveal the old factory. Kara took off her helmet, slinging it over the Ducati’s handle. Maggie mirrored that on her Triumph, giving it a slight shake to make sure that the kickstand was secure. 

The factory was boxed in by a rusted metal fence topped with barbed wire. Maggie walked closer to inspect rotten wooden boxes stacked against the fence, wary that they could be being watched. The place was in darkness, but her gut told her to stay vigilant. 

The boxes had faded insignias stamped on the top:  _ Danvers Bio-Solutions. _

“These are old symbols. Before the rebrand,” Kara observed, then clarified at Maggie’s questioning look, “We rebranded when Jeremiah passed away.”

Maggie checked her phone, where Winn had been funnelling through the information. “Is this the place?”

“Must be.”

“It does look abandoned.”

Kara slipped her glasses off and into her pocket. “The walls are lined with lead. But I can hear…”

She cocked her head to the side, then scanned at the fence. 

Hope surged like a stranglehold. “Human? Alien?” 

“It’s fuzzy.” Kara straightened. “Let’s check it out.”

Seeing no apparent weakness in the fence, she scooped Maggie up by the waist and launched them both into the air. They lifted over the fence and settled beside the boxes. 

“Warning?” Maggie squeaked. 

“Shhhh…”

Kara haunched, rapidly glancing between the shady corners of the dusty concrete building, like a bird on a winter’s morning. She waved them both forward, then took off at a run towards a point on the wall closest to them. Halfway across the abandoned industrial lot, Kara began to zigzag. Without asking what they were doing, Maggie followed each twist, understanding that it was likely to avoid the scope of the cameras and exploit the blindspots. 

As they pasted themselves to the wall and inched towards a corner, Maggie saw the white van that they had been tracking parked outside an open shutter. Two men’s voices were faintly heard. They trundled towards it, step by step, until the men’s words were more distinct. 

“What do we do about those two?” Maggie whispered. 

Kara pushed her chin into the air, and in a blur she disappeared. Maggie could hear sharp sounds of alarm, even jumping at a bullet being peeled off. After a count of five, Kara poked her head out of the shutter. Her hair was ruffled, but otherwise, she was unphased. 

“Come on,” she sunnily encouraged, as if this was an adventure. 

The place had likely been the loading and receiving bay for whatever purpose this factory had in the past. It was sparsely decorated, with only a rickety table and a few metal shelves with miscellaneous items. On the table were two guns unloaded and squatting on the floor tied together with cable ties were two scowling men in dark uniforms. 

One of them seemed to be angry at his pride being dented by a superfast alien, the other looked like he was going to vomit at any second. 

“Where are they?” Maggie asked. 

“Who?” The angry one barked back. 

“The aliens.” 

When neither replied, Kara whistled and cracked her knuckles, making the nervous one squirm.

“Beyond that door,” he blurted.

“Idiot,” the other muttered. 

Both Kara and Maggie moved towards the door, but the blonde stopped dead mid-stride. 

“What?”

Kara stood back. “It’s…” She took another step back. “Kryptonite. It limits Clark’s abilities and can hurt him. I guess it’s the same for me.”

Maggie looked at the doorway, then Kara’s slight distress, then at the unloaded guns. If her theory was correct, then there was a good chance that there could be a stash of Lex’s Kryptonite here, which of course would affect Kara. She marched to the table, loaded one of the handguns, and thumbed at the men on the floor. 

“You look after these two, I’ll go look for Stapha.”

Kara nodded, putting her hands on her hips. 

Gripping the gun, Maggie made her way through the doorway and down a long corridor. It felt foreign to hold a weapon again after so long. She had made a point not to be armed when she was undercover at the estate.

To her left were glass panels looking onto an empty factory floor, no one standing at the still conveyor belts or tending to the machines. However, just before she reached the stairs which led onto that level, a spacious room to her right caught her attention. 

An attempt had clearly been made to transform it into a makeshift laboratory of some kind. It was anachronistic, with new equipment haphazardly strewn amongst dusty, dark monitors. There were clothes over some parts of the lab, the hum of old fridges, and in the centre, what appeared to be an old dentist’s chair. 

And in a human-sized pen, an unconscious figure was slumped against the wall. 

“Stapha!”

She hurried around the dentist’s chair, dropping her weapon onto it and kneeling by the pen. She reached through the thin bars and gently shook Stapha’s shoulder. “Hey, Stapha. It’s Maggie Sawyer.”

Stapha groaned, her head rolling as her eyelids fluttered. Her voice was thick with sleep. “Maggie?”

“Are you okay?”

Drugged and disorientated, Stapha struggled to focus. “What are you doing here?”

Maggie glanced back at the door, then started to work at the lock. “What do you remember?”

“Uh…” Stapha pushed herself up with a grimace, palming her temple. “Someone texted me and asked if I could meet them. I said yes. But when I was leaving my apartment building…” She took a deep breath in, then pushed it out. “Actually,  _ did _ I leave my apartment building?”

Maggie gritted her teeth as she pulled at the lock, then began to hunt the dusty surfaces for the key. “Was it Alex Danvers?”

A pause, then a tight answer. “How do you know that?”

“Relax, Stapha,” Maggie assured, “It wasn’t Alex Danvers. It’s someone targeting aliens who she is treating.”

Even between the rattling of the drawers she searched, she heard the hitch in Stapha’s breath. “Oh. Those other aliens who- I- did they?”

“Hey, woah.” Maggie turned and held up her palms. “Don’t worry about them. We’re here to get you out, okay?”

She came back to the pen, where Stapha looked much more awake, panicked. She kept her dark hair long, which hid the pointed tips of her ears away from hostile eyes. Those, along with eyes which appeared unnaturally swampy green in direct light, were the only indicators that she wasn’t human. 

Maggie lifted the lock and examined the bottom, then clicked her fingers. “I think this requires the old fashioned way.” She reached into the pen as Stapha stood, relying heavily on the concrete wall for balance. “Give me one of your hairslides.”

Without hesitation, Stapha handed one over, then once again braced against the wall as she found herself unsteady. Maggie worked at the lock, wondering what came next. Should they call law enforcement? Or a pro-alien shelter? She wasn’t sure she even had cell signal here. 

With a triumphant crack, the lock clicked open and Maggie swung the pen open. Stapha twitched, still somewhat unbalanced, so she eased in and supported her weight. 

“Let’s go,” Maggie whispered. 

As they inched away from the pen, she spotted something she had missed in the shadows: on what appeared to be an old hat stand was a prototype of a headdress, very similar to Neuro-Connect. 

She glowered at the very shape of it, phantom gun powder wafting unto her nostrils.

There was her smoking gun. 

Reaching the door, they listened out for anything above the hum of the monitors. When there was nothing, they made it out to the walkway, each careful footfall a resounding clang given the emptiness of the factory below. 

Stapha cleared her throat, still dry from her unconscious state. “What do you know about...Alex. About what she does?”

“I know she’s helping you with a sickness,” Maggie said, “That’s all.”

“I just…”

“It’s none of my business.” She tried to pitch her voice between the intimacies that they had once shared, and the firm assurance she knew would bring trust. “Let’s just focus on getting you outta here.”

When Kara caught sight of them, she dragged a chair from the desk and Stapha gratefully took it. She breathed heavily, as if that short journey had been a marathon.

“Hi,” Kara said, then turned seriously to Maggie. “J’onn is on his way.”

Maggie propped her hands on her hips, glancing back at the doorway as if someone was lurking behind. She realised with a frown that she had left the gun on the dentist’s chair. “Good.”

“In the meantime, I think you should see this.”

Kara made towards a room off to the other side. Maggie made sure that Stapha was well enough in her chair, then followed. The annex seemed to be serving as an office, with files and folders piled on tables. There was a terminal with new dual monitors, sticking out against the old grey printer, the ring-binders, and the large steel safe. 

Which was lying open. 

The broken kind of open. 

Maggie raised an eyebrow at Kara. “I know you’re strong. But that’s a steel safe.”

“So I kinda…” Kara made a motion like she was cranking a handle and pulling something away. “Anyway, I found documents which could match the breach files that Winn identified in our systems. I also found these in here...”

She held up documents which rustled like leaves in the breeze. Maggie ran her eye over them; there were lists of aliens, species, names. She could see the five victims circled one on of the pages, and took a closer look at the index. Peter’s name was there, crossed through with a black line. Four more were circled, including Stapha. 

“There was only Stapha there?” Kara asked, “You didn’t find the other three?”

Maggie put down the documents. “She was the only one in the room.”

She made a mental note to ask Stapha whether she had any knowledge of the other three, whether she was kept with them or whether they were taken separately. 

Kara shifted on her toes. “One last thing…”

Plastic creaked as she held up a DVD disk case with a date on it. 

“What is this?” she asked. 

“I don’t know but…” Kara pointed at the date printed in black marker. “This is the date that Jeremiah died.”

Alex’s forlorn voice as they sat on the grassy mount overlooking the estate. The mystery of her father’s death. 

With no chairs or seats, Maggie bent over the PC and clicked the optical drive. Looking back at Kara for permission, she clicked on it. It slithered out as she popped open the DVD case. She carefully placed the disc in the drive, pressed it closed, and listened as the fans of the harddrive whirred to life. 

“I’m just going to check on Stapha,” Kara uttered, then hurried out of the room, as if afraid something frightening would flash on the screen. 

Maggie was fortunate to find no passcode or password required for the machine and was able to click straight onto the disc when it registered. It launched into a video player displaying the first frame: old CCTV footage from what appeared to be outside of this very factory, where the white van was currently parked. 

But it was dated years ago. There was a helicopter outside in the yard space. 

She hovered the cursor over the player button, but waited until Kara’s footsteps came back into the room. She glanced over her shoulder. “Ready?”

Kara nodded, but had turned a sickly shade of white. Maggie wasn’t sure if it was from the Kryptonite or from the prospect of what would appear on the video. 

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” Kara said sharply. 

So she pressed play. 

There was no audio. Just a clear black and white feed of the yard. Several figures came into view, their backs to the lens, but then they turned. Maggie recognised Jeremiah from the family photo in the stable drawer, and from the research she had done on the Danvers before going undercover. Another imposing figure was Lillian, in her black trench and heels. 

Lackeys watched as the two of them seemed to be arguing. They gestured at the building, at the helicopter, into the air. Then, Jeremiah and one of the men went towards the helicopter and climbed in. Lillian stood for the rotor blades moving, then turned away before it lifted off. 

The timeline bar appeared as the video ended, having run its course. 

“Let’s take that,” Kara said stiffly, reaching out. Maggie dutifully took the disc from the computer, placed it back in the case, and handed it over.

If this wasn’t suspicious, why would it have been kept? Had Jeremiah been killed to try and cripple the company, only for it to continue to grow and develop down the years? Was this evidence that, long before Lillian put a target on Alex’s back, she had put a target on her father’s? Was this corporate jealousy, rivalry long before the attempts to ruin the Expo? Or was this to do with the Luthors’ rampant anti-alien agenda?

For now, this revelation would have to wait. 

They went back into the main storeroom, carrying their loot. Stapha had her head in her hands, an uncapped bottle of water between her shoes. In the corner lay a puddle of smashed glass from an unlit vending machine, where bottles hung down ready to be snatched up. 

Maggie hadn’t heard anything in the office. As she raised her eyebrow, Kara held up her hands. 

She crouched down in front of Stapha. It was strange, seeing her ex now. They hadn’t had a very long or involved relationship, but examining the sickly face of someone familiar, she knew that her death would have been much more personal.

“When you were taken,” she said, keeping her tone tempered and even, “Do you know if there were other people taken with you?” 

“I don’t know.” Stapha shook her head. “I’m sorry I don’t remember.”

“It’s okay.” Maggie shifted on her haunches, glancing at the two men, who had gone from moody to looking glum. “How are you feeling?”

Stapha palmed her eyes, then the sides of her scalp. The latter was a nervous tick Maggie recognised; it was making sure her pointed ears were covered by her thick, dark hair. “How am I supposed to be feeling?”

Without an answer for her, Maggie rose and went over to see what Kara was up to. She was leafing through the documents they had taken from the office. At the top of some pages were the block letters; PROJECT CADMUS. They had dates, handwritten notes, sketches, names. Even city maps. 

Suddenly picking up on Kara’s energy, Maggie spread the pages out and joined the race in putting together the puzzle pieces. All too quickly, the horror struck. 

There were a number of ‘unfortunate termination’ dates. The last page in what would be an experimental file. Each of them had a name and date; the dates that each of the victims’ bodies were dumped. Some of them had Luthorcorp logos in the header and footers. 

All were signed at the bottom with Lillian Luthor’s signature. 

And there was more. 

Out of order were documents linked to the terminal pages, which showed destinations, names, and whereabouts. They showed sample texts, faking that they were from Alex Danvers. 

Maggie couldn’t believe what she was seeing. “She planned every single one of them. She trapped them, caught them, and discarded them when they were done.”

“Do you know what’s next?” Kara said, hands scrambling through the stack of files. “I think I’m putting them out of order.”

Standing on her tiptoes, Maggie drank in the white spread over the rickety table. She lifted a page which seemed like a masterlist, the one with the circled names. She flipped it, and on the back were handwritten dates with shorthand symbols and names beside them. 

“The list ends with Cadmus: Day One,” Maggie observed, then scanned across to the date, “But the date is today.”

Kara’s eyes went wide as she looked around at Stapha, whose head had perked up at the sudden frenetic energy. 

“What?” She sat up in the chair. “What, Maggie?”

“We’re just trying to figure out what’s going on,” Maggie placated. 

Then, another presence made itself known. J’onn, dressed very smartly, lumbered straight into the factory stock room. Maggie realised that, with no accompanying vehicle, no extra headlights, he might also be able to fly. 

Without addressing them, he went straight to Stapha and knelt down. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah. I think so,” she said, bewildered at his appearance, “Who are you? 

“I’m here to help.” Hestood and came over to them at the table. “The Expo has just opened.”

“Oh no.” Kara stood ramrod straight. She held a piece of paper with the day’s date at the top. 

It was a floor plan of the National City exhibition centre. 

“J’onn,” she said urgently.

He propped his hands on his hips. “I hate doing this,” he said darkly, “It’s a violation.”

Maggie looked between them, unsure of the solemn subtext to their conversation. However, what Kara said next struck a nerve: “For Alex’s safety.”

This dissolved his hesitancy, his resolve galvanising him. He loosened his bowtie and rounded on the two men, still bunching together on the floor. 

Maggie watched as his eyes glowed red, just as they had that night he had revealed himself as a Martian. She held her breath for one, two, three seconds, before the red glow diminished and he fixed a very serious expression on them. 

“I have to go now,” he said, “Those other three missing aliens are being used to attack the Expo.”

“No,” Kara said, stepping around Maggie. “You stay with these two. I’ll go.”

She tore off towards the mouth of the factory, but Maggie chased after her. 

“I’m coming with you.”

Bouncing back on her heels, Kara shook her head. “Maggie-”

“Take me with you.”

Kara gestured in a last ditch attempt for J’onn to support her refusal, and when none came, she looped an arm around Maggie’s waist. 

_ “Fine.” _

Without another moment’s thought, they soared into the sky. 


	11. Chapter 11

Hurtling through the evening sky, she wasn’t sure whether to squeeze her eyes shut or watch the world rushing beneath her. She settled for keeping her attention glued to Kara’s arm clenched around her waist. 

She clutched her phone as they streamed through the desert sky, the G-force melting the skin around her cheekbones. The miles of sand rushed like water beneath them, and still it wasn’t fast enough. 

“Faster!” she howled, barely hearing her own voice over the top of the wind.

Many irrational thoughts pinged around her skull. 

What would happen with her motorcycle left at the factory? When this was done, what would the nature of her relationship with Alex be? Was she just another experiment to the scientist? How had she been right about Lillian? Her guesswork had been invalidated by coming far too late. 

The milky blues of dusk were just inking the top of the sunset, but all too soon the thicket of skyscrapers that made up the National City skyline appeared, first as dots, then rapidly growing up like tendrils from the horizon.

They grew and grew until Maggie realised Kara wouldn’t be letting up in her speed. 

“Kara,” she yelled, “Kara, watch out!”

They swung around the Stilton Gas Tower, over the lip of the NC Arena and then divebombed towards downtown. Maggie closed her eyes tight, pinching at Kara’s bicep as they drew too close to oncoming traffic on the streets below.

And then the National City exhibition centre came into focus. Kara released her a few feet in the air, so that she stumbled but stayed on her feet. Without waiting, Maggie took a deep breath and sprinted past a line of blacked out limos parked along the front, likely chauffeured services for the investors at the Expo. 

She charged through the door, ducking security and vaulting through a scanner which screamed in protest. She skidded around a corner and then held up her hands as a dozen people rushed past her in a panic. She battled through to the main convention floor, standing to take it all in. 

Through the line of booths, she could see that the long table where investors were served dinner had smashed to the floor, one plate still rolling as a mighty crash resounded through the hall. 

She couldn’t quite make out what was happening, but as she raced up through trashed booths and toppled banners, she could see it was carnage. Some people were hiding, stuffed into the few nooks that the open hall afforded. 

She crouched behind an untouched booth, jumping in fear as a hand clamped around her wrist. 

It was Alex. 

She ducked under the table. “You okay?”

“Yeah, you?”

“Yeah.” 

Alex was dressed in a smart suit, with dinner make-up, and Maggie’s erratic thoughts briefly flashed with disappointment that she saw her like this under these particular circumstances. 

And then, careening into view just up ahead, three zombie-like figures appeared. Their eyes were wide and white, as if possessed, and all three of them had some sort of headdress on. 

_ Headdress. _

Alex’s chest rose and fell rapidly, eyes darting about. “What the hell is this?”

“I think they’re the aliens that went missing last night. We got Stapha safely out, but these are the other three.”

The aliens tore through a booth, causing someone who had been hiding under the flimsy plastic stand-up table to bolt out with a shriek. They needed to think fast. 

As Maggie flitted through any option coming to her mind, the aliens suddenly stopped dead. As they hovered around a particular booth, she leaned up and squinted, trying to see what had gotten their attention. 

The booth was more pronounced than others around it, right at the centre of the exhibition hall. Its banners were clean and clear, its centrepiece a helmet at chest-level and on its own for investors to oogle: Renutia. 

The three aliens hovered around the booth, swaying near the helmet, as if paused. She realised that somehow it was interfering with them.

Then, a businessman took this lull as his chance to sprint from his hiding spot towards the exit. In his haste to escape, he tripped and pulled a lead out from an outlet, which clicked the lights out around the Renutia helmet. 

After that, the aliens snapped up, eyes whitening again as they once again began to wreck havoc.

“The helmet seemed to affect them.”

Alex nodded, staring at the helmet, on the same tracks. “Because it works on the basis of telekinetic and telepathic energies from Martian matter…” 

Maggie recalled the test they had done so long ago. There were no physical wires connecting it to the system which had flashed up her brain scan. 

“It’s wireless.” 

“Yeah.”

“Could you override the interface between the computer and the helmet?”

Alex shook her head. “I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

Maggie cursed under her breath, and then saw a crop of brown hair rising up, eyes peering over the dinner table. 

“You can’t,” she said, “But I know someone who can.”

And with that, she dashed towards the dinner table, keeping low and out of sight. She almost slid to a stop, kneeling down beside a cowering Winn. 

“Maggie!” he greeted. 

“Listen,” she hissed, “The Renutia helmet might be able to override the frequencies controlling the aliens.”

“The  _ what _ ?”

“That thing.” Maggie pointed at the helmet on its stand, miraculously untouched in its set up for investors and media to gawk at. “It affects them.”

“Okay…” he drawled, “So?”

“So…” She shifted on her toes as her calves cramped. “I’m gonna plug it back in, and you’re gonna try and reprogramme it to snap them out of it.”

“What?”

“Jam the signals, hack the headsets, DDoS the Expo’s public wifi,” she listed, waving around, “Anything you can think of.”

Kara, who had been busy evacuating the hall as the three aliens threw debris, appeared as a distraction, affording Winn and Maggie the perfect opportunity. They leaped up and over the table, sprinting towards the Renutia station. As Maggie gripped the plug and scampered towards an outlet, Winn clicked on the terminal.

One of the aliens stomped their way towards Kara, but the other two growled and turned in the direction of Winn and Maggie.

“Uh, Maggie?”

“Yeah?”

“Member your friend, Kimalya?” His voice pitched higher and higher as he spoke. “And how she was a species which looked human but could spit acid?”

“Yeah?”

“Well-”

Just then the taller of the two aliens snorted and, with a huff from its stomach, spat fluid in their direction. It landed just feet in front of the helmet stand and sizzled angrily, burning the purple carpet of the exhibition floor. 

Winn squeaked. “Maggie!”

But it wasn’t her that saved them when the alien reared back for another attack. With a gust of white, powdery smoke, Alex appeared beside them with a fire extinguisher. Maggie spotted a second one in the bracket on the wall, and with a jump over two downed booth dividers, she grabbed it. 

It was the type to just shoot water, she read with chagrin, but she took it with her anyway. With a whistle, she sprayed in the direction of the aliens. Together, she and Alex herded the aliens away from the Renutia booth. 

But then, not watching her footing, she tripped, the extinguisher banging out of her grip. The taller, acid-spitting alien lumbered towards her. She scrambled backwards until she hit a wall. It reared back and her limbs locked in fear.

Then, just as it was about to spit, it froze. It’s whitened eyes flickered, and then it dropped to the floor. Across the hall, the second, then third also fell. 

And then there was stillness. 

Alex looked at Winn, who peered over the terminal at the fallen three aliens. Maggie pushed herself up and brushed herself off, wandering over to them. Alex’s extinguisher hung from her hands as she tried to process the scene. Kara climbed over the rubble until she too stood with them. 

The terminal connected with the Renutia helmet bleeped happily, as if assessed that the danger was clear. 

And then, a few feet away, there was movement. Alex brandished the extinguisher like a weapon.

A man with hair ruffled out of place shakily got to his feet. He smoothed down his rumpled suit, a press badge swinging down with the movement. He looked at the four gathered around the terminal, then at the alien closest to them, then at all the surrounding damage. 

“Was that-” His voice cracked, so he cleared it. “Did that helmet knock them out?”

A distracted Alex did not realise the implications of his observation. “Yeah it did.”

He fixed his lanyard and ran a rough hand through his hair. Maggie imagined at the beginning of the night he was tailored with no strand out of place. A second figure stood up with an identical lanyard, gripping a black Canon. He snapped a picture of the four around the console, causing them all to blink in a daze.

The cameraman checked his LED screen, then grinned. The press guy took his phone out of his pocket, snapped a quick picture, and then grinned as well. He surveyed the Renutia’s booth, making his assessments of it as the centrepiece of the Expo. 

“Alex Danvers,” he said breathlessly, combing down his unruly hair, “With that display, I think you’ve won over a nice pot of cash tonight.”

~

Three days later, Maggie was back at the start; in her office as the sun went down. Behind her, she could hear Alex’s voice, small and artificial as it blared from a phone. Winn and James watched as the CEO spoke with journalists at a press conference, closing out what they managed to recover and reassemble of the Expo. 

The journalist had been correct: the attack had been an unorthodox way of showing off the product to the public, but it was extremely effective. Potent, if the stock brokers and business analysis trundling along on social media could be trusted. 

Closing her eyes and listening to Alex’s calm, steady answers to each of the excited journalists’ questions, Maggie tried to imagine what would happen now. She had done her part: discovered how those aliens had been killed. As for the three dazed aliens at the Expo, they had been snuck out from the exhibition centre under the guise of detainment, cared for, and safely smuggled home. 

Now was time to prepare to get the evidence together and speak with the victims’ families. 

And then…

The end?

James chuckled. “Hey Maggie, your girlfriend is a social media star.”

“She’s trending number two on twitter,” Winn added, “Not bad considering that one of the biggest Kpop bands in the world have dropped an album this afternoon…”

Maggie opened her eyes and forced a sardonic grin as she faced them. “She’s not my girlfriend.”

She turned to her board. She couldn’t imagine it clean again; it had been so busy for so long. But cleaning was a ritual she performed after each case, no matter how trivial. She would scan all her paperwork into a harddrive, every clue she had gathered along the way, then burn the physical copies. It meant she would never lose the records, but would be exorcising the bad elements from her life and embracing the serenity of resolution. 

After helping Winn pack up some of his equipment and carry it out of the office, Maggie bid them goodbye and trudged back upstairs. The sun cast long shadows on the floor, the rest of the building having clocked off. Traffic was easing off of peak time. Everything was quiet and still. 

She needed to go to the estate to collect the things she had kept at the cabin. In the whirlwind of it all she had finally gone back to her apartment after two months of it being vacant. She pinched at her temples, trying to sift through her activities and put them into a semblance of order. 

She could spend the evening following up on some of the emails she had received about other possible cases. With her stablehand salary obviously being severed - she imagined - she needed to pick up her next job. 

But rather than open her laptop and get down to it, she found herself sitting on the back of her desk, staring at the board. The victims, Kara’s sketchy diagram, the pictures James had collated and collected, all of the suspects she had ruled out at the beginning… 

A knock on the door. 

She called out over her shoulder. “What did you guys forget?” 

“Hard to say,” a voice replied, “I haven’t been here before.”

She slipped off the desk in surprise, seeing Alex leaning in the door frame. She hadn’t seen her since the night of the Expo opening, since they had made sure the aliens got away safely and had assured them that - since they had been manipulated - no charges would be pressed. She had been in contact with Kara and J’onn, but Alex had been understandably busy and she wasn’t entirely sure where they stood now. 

Alex sauntered in, roaming her gaze around the office. “This is nice.” She reached the window, and smiled as she spotted her own company’s billboard across the way. 

_ Play it cool _ , Maggie thought. She crossed her arms over her chest, heart beating so hard she could almost feel it through her breastbone. “What’s a rich CEO like you doing in a place like this?”

Alex’s smile grew as she gestured to the company billboard, showing two young women studying coloured liquid in beakers. “Encouraging more women into STEM.”

Maggie chuckled. Alex joined her at the board, keeping a good few inches between them, but close enough. She studied it for a long minute, and then, “You thought I had something to do with this.”

“It was a possibility that I needed to disprove.”

Alex hummed. With the long shadows, Maggie hadn’t noticed her carrying a leather briefcase which she hoisted onto the desk. She unclasped a gold lock, then picked out some documents and handed them over. 

“These are the full medicals I ran on Stapha and the other three,” she explained, “Comparing them with morgue reports, and with what you found at that desert lab, I’ve come up with a theory.”

“Oh?”

Alex nodded, pulling out still more paperwork. She set it into five piles, labelled with the names of the five deceased victims. 

Jennifer Go. 

Ageddis Aolin. 

Pobba Porra. 

Chantelle Ganez. 

Ya’Hewrkz.

“They were kidnapped as test subjects for Neuro-Connect, which went then wrong. They were targets because they were selected from the data breach….meaning…”

“That with the false text and the address in the victim’s pockets, you’d be scapegoated.”

“Right.”

Maggie thought of the rallies, the stabbings. “Why the violence?”

Alex dug into the briefcase, then brought out some documents stamped with PROJECT CADMUS. “I’ve been reading through the development and conceptual files. Neuro-Connect was aimed at deterring and preventing alien crime. Or at least being seen to do so. I guess the violence was supposed to stir up interest in that technology.”

“That’s backfired for her.”

With how the press was reported on the Renutia helmet, it had definitely backfired. But Alex didn’t seem to be very buoyed by the product’s stratospheric announcement into the public eye. The helmet had been intended to help Alzheimer's sufferers regain some dignity, to renew brain cells and halt their decline as much as the treatment could, not control alien combatants.

“That’s not what it should be used for, Maggie.”

Hearing the sadness in her voice, she took her hand and held it like it was no big deal. “I know.” She squeezed Alex’s knuckles. “What’s the rest of your theory?”

“So the failed experiments proved fatal, causing the catastrophic brain injuries,” she said. Even as a scientist, she shivered. Maggie did too, imaging the devices practically melting their minds. “Finally, it worked. They attacked the Expo.”

“Were they used to attack the humans on the morning of Lillian’s rally?”

“No.” Alex pointed at the list that Maggie had seen at the abandoned factory. “Killed by the men employed under Project Cadmus.” 

“Straight up murders.” She gritted her teeth, then, “Well, they’re all straight up murders.”

“Yeah.”

Many stones had been unturned inthe search for answers, but there was one thing still outstanding. “I’ve got one last question.”

“Shoot.”

“What  _ is _ behind the nuclear vault door?”

Alex laughed, gathering some of the paper into neater piles. “A med bay.” 

“A  _ med _ bay?”

“Yeah there’s a configured MRI scanner, it can perform all kinds of scans, X rays, ultrasounds, and infrared scans. It’s got a lot of modification, for different types of aliens, you know?” 

She remembered going for an MRI out of college, how she had to wait outside block radiation doors. It dawned on her now why Alex had been so coy about it. 

“Plus,” Alex added, “There are all kinds of chemicals I keep in there for treatment on aliens that are way too dangerous to be kept near any investors snooping around my home station.”

Maggie made a noise of understanding, then the two of them shuffled the papers into a neat order and returned them to the briefcase. She hitched a hip on the table. “So, do we have a plan of action?”

“Oh yes we do.” Alex swung the briefcase down in one hand, and leaned closer, voice lowering. “I’m a very powerful woman, you know.”

“Yeah?”

“Access to all kinds of information.”

Alex leaned in for a kiss, then pulled back and tugged them towards the door. 

“Where are we going?” Maggie asked, allowing herself to be led by the wrist.

“The airport.”

~

With the speed of the limo, it felt as if they were racing the sunset, everything an orange and grey blur outside the window. 

They had coordinated it exactly this way: J’onn was on his way, equipped with the proof that Lillian had hired two people for ‘Cadmus’ to attack the two humans before the rally, two poor innocent victims targeted only to be part of a conspiracy. 

Alex was also interested in hunting down the rest of the running men for this outfit, but they would take out the leader first.

“We won’t get her for those five victims, unfortunately. The laws around harm to aliens aren’t strong enough yet,” Alex said, “But the humans. The proof of illegal experimentation with unlicensed scientific machinery and unauthorized use of medical equipment. The cyber attack on my servers, corporate espionage…”

Maggie slumped lower in the seat with each charge. The irony wasn’t lost on her: to fume about how wealthy people committing white collar crimes operated on a different level of justice while speeding along in a high-end limousine. 

Tires squealed as they pulled into the airport grounds, security waving them through a barrier usually reserved for letting in emergency vehicles. They pulled into the rear of the airport, where half a dozen private jets sat idle. Clustered around one of them was a handful of police cars. 

Alex peered out in satisfaction as Brian killed the engine. “Perfect timing.” 

He got out and opened the limo doors. Maggie and Alex emerged onto the airport tarmac and looked up the steps of the private jet. Between two burly police officers was Lillian Luthor. 

They escorted her down the steps and onto the tarmac. The plane’s engine hadn’t even begun, meaning they truly did get there just in time.

Maggie was only an observer to this standoff, but the hair on the back of her neck stood on end. She watched the way that Alex and Lillian stared at each other, calm as two dogs might be before they finally bared their teeth and fought to the death. 

“You can’t seriously believe you can play this move, Alexandra.” Lillian glared down the bridge of her nose. “It’s a bit brash, even for you who is known to be so hot headed, inexperienced and immature at this elite level of business.”

Alex was defiant and calm. “Intellectual theft is ugly for someone so levelled headed, experienced, mature.”

The subtext was clear:  _ My purse is bigger than your purse. _

Eyes like a hawk, a voice like honey, Lillian said, “Your father would be very proud.”

Maggie’s breath caught in her throat. She remembered how fragile Alex had been at the dinner table, a far cry from her composure now.

She wouldn’t let her get the last dig. “He would.”

Lillian sneered as she was tugged away by the cops. And just like that, the focus went off the exchange. The cops moved about, securing the plane, booking Lillian. The aircraft staff were struck dumb by the events, and decided they could clock off for the night. The pilot stood back and smoked an e-cig, puffing it into the night, signalling the gasping end of the saga. 

Maggie sensed an energy in the air as she looked at the dusk settling around them, the sun’s last long rays stretching their shadows out onto the dusty tarmac. It was as if this could be a place where they could start fresh and meet again, or maybe that was naive hope. 

Maybe this was the end of the story now.

Still, something about the way Alex stood on the tarmac felt familiar.

“You and me on hot airport tarmac. Surrounded by luxury jets...” She ran the toe of her boot on the faded white markings. “Only in these circumstances.”

Alex shielded her eyes and gazed out at the long flat stretch of runway, the heat vapour still shimmering off it even now. Then she made for the limo. Brian still held the door open for her, and she paused before she got in. 

“Coming home?” 

She offered it like it meant everything and nothing; a casual bombshell. Full of hope, but with protection against rejection.

Maggie took a deep breath and headed for the vehicle. 

There was one last thing to do. 

~

“Well, we’re here.”

Maggie felt tingles from her ankles to her hips as the engine rumbled to a stop. “We are.”

Alex rubbed the flat of her palms together, weakly joking, “I can’t really sneak you in…”

Unlike the night of the storm, people seemed to be awake tonight. The lights of the estate house shone down, penetrating the darkened windows of the limo like a judgement. 

“Don’t worry about it.”

She bit her lower lip. “Maybe I could come down later?”

Maggie’s stomach folded over. She was once again filled with that desire to begin again - to renew- like she had on the airport tarmac. She almost flirted the idea back to Alex, imagining them tumbling down onto the cabin’s couch to make love without even reaching upstairs. 

But then Alex broke into a wide, shuddering yawn, and Maggie took pity on her for the exhaustion that was likely settling in after all the press and praise of the past few days. 

She chuckled. “Don’t worry about it.”

Alex shifted more fully to face her, clearly one last rush of adrenaline hitting her system. “It’s after the Expo, though, and I want to talk about this. I want to be on the right page.”

Maggie glanced at the divider to the driver. Alex held up a hand before she even asked. “Brian’s a locked box.”

“I…” Maggie sighed, shuffling closer. “I like you Alex. In different circumstances, I’d definitely date you in a heartbeat.”

“But?”

“But…” She gestured at the two of them. At Alex’s suit, her briefcase, the limo, even her Ferster watch.

In an impulsive rattle, Alex pulled off the Ferster as if that silver watch would symbolise all of her wealth. “All of this doesn’t matter, Maggie.”

“It does, though. And you know it.”

Where she had previously had the alien deaths to focus on, Maggie now had no choice but to confront the weak reality that perhaps there wasn’t any future worth fantasising about for them. The press would tear Alex apart about a love affair with a private investigator, not to mention those who would prefer the CEO to stay in the closet, if they even suspected she was gay. 

“If…” She ran her thumb over her lower lip. “If I found a way to make it work. Discreetly, for a while. Would you…?”

Maggie could only imagine them muddied on social media, in the opportunist press. Headlines and banners and slogans galore, all tearing them to pieces. The alien-friendly PI and the CEO. “There’s a huge risk. The tabloids-”

“I  _ know _ how the tabloids work,” Alex snapped. 

Maggie blinked in surprise, and Alex seemed to melt, mumbling an apology. She glanced at the divider, taking a deep breath. 

“You’ve already transformed my whole way of thinking, of feeling, Maggie.” With her tone so raw, her eyes shone with emotion. “I’ve never met anyone like you, and I’m afraid if you go away, and I go back to…” Her expression crumpled in regret. “That I’m never going to find this feeling again.”

Her hand scrambled to find Maggie’s on the leather seat. “Please,” she whispered. “I’m trying not to beg, but please.”

At the sincerity, a spring well burst in Maggie’s chest. All of these things she had wanted, had never known she wanted, she felt now. 

She kissed Alex with as much passion as she could muster. Alex arched into her, hands burying into her hair, the limo’s seats squeaking in protest. 

Then, pulling back and seeing the dark, desperate eyes seeking an answer, she put her best foot forward into this great unknown. 

“Okay. We can try.”

~

She stayed in the cabin that night, not without sharing a handful more of those passionate goodnight kisses in the back of the limousine. Alex had to assure her once again that Brian wouldn’t tell a soul. 

In the morning, Maggie woke up to a message telling her that Yvonne and her assistant were preparing a full breakfast on the patio for her, which Winn and James had also been invited to. Along with Kara, Alex, J’onn and Eliza, they enjoyed a gluttony of fruits and cooked meats, breads and spreads. 

And of course, the coffee that Maggie had been so taken with the day she tried the Renutia helmet. 

Alex filled her coffee mug then excused herself, retreating to her office to return some calls as the Expo was dismantled. Reaction to the helmet was starting to taper off, but the confidence in the company’s direction had driven up stock prices and the investors were chirping happily. 

Now, Maggie enjoyed the warmth of the mid-morning sun beaming down on her. She stood on the balcony, watching the kitchen staff clearing the patio below, feeling guilty that she had been shooed away from helping clean up.

Kara propped her elbows on the balcony beside her. They watched James and Winn flank J’onn as he showed them into the neatly trimmed gardens. 

“So…” she drawled, “I heard that Alex has convinced you to stick around for a while in a non-working capacity.” 

Maggie detected a hint of playfulness in the question. “You’re quick.”

“Mmmhmm.” 

A motor burred as Vasquez appeared at the bottom of the garden atop a ride-on lawn mower. Observing the panoramic view of the gardens from the balcony, Maggie figured that the task of cutting grass alone was a day’s work. Living around this way of life would take a lot of getting used to, even if she was just visiting Alex. 

“It’s weird but I had fun with you and the guys,” Kara said, “Felt like a puzzle, you know? I mean, I  _ know _ there were lives on the line but...”

Maggie smiled as she grew bashful. “I get that. A really stressful puzzle.”

“I’m still not sure whether I wanna go down the same route that Clark did into journalism but…” Kara pushed her glasses up her nose. “Maybe something like that....”

Again Maggie was drawn back to the beginning, when her goals had been dual: to find out what happened to those victims, and then expand her office manpower. With the police continuing to turn a blind eye to crimes against aliens and other marginalised communities, a private investigator’s workload only grew.

“Before all this started, I was looking for a partner.”

Kara snapped towards her. “Really?”

“Someone to help out.” Maggie raised an eyebrow. “Maybe think about it?”

Before a second’s consideration, Kara opened her mouth to accept, but an interruption came from behind: 

“So here you both are.”

Alex had her shirt sleeves rolled to her elbows, lips pinched in a slight smile. She seemed like not all of her calls had been from investors foaming at the mouth for more information on Renutia’s development and launch timeframe. They didn’t have to wait to ask. 

With a heavy sigh, she said, “All of the evidence has been submitted to the DA’s office. They’re convening the grand jury and…” She lifted her hands as if weighing something invisible, then dropped them in defeat. “We’ll see what happens.”

“Great.” Kara nodded, then said, “You did good work, Maggie.”

Slipping her thumbs into the loops of her jeans, Maggie said, “I think it was a team effort.”

She listened to birds twittering as they swooped overhead. Kara watched them too, and without thinking about it, began to levitate a few inches into the air. Alex gripped her wrist and yanked her back to the balcony. 

“What- why not?” Kara spluttered. Alex gestured in exasperation at Yvonne and her assistant loading a dining cart of dirty dishes below, and Kara rolled her eyes. “Oh Alex, they  _ know _ .”

“No, they don’t!”

For the next few minutes after that they didn’t speak, enjoying J’onn’s irritation as Winn insisted he ride on Vasquez’s motorised lawn mower. After inevitably clicking the incorrect control, the mower careened in a straight line down towards the tall hedges, Vasquez and James chasing after him as J’onn propped his hands on his hips and shook his head. 

Kara took a long breath, then turned to them both. She produced something that she had stuffed in the deep pocket of her jacket. Once Maggie caught sight of the plastic case, it was as if the morning sunshine had gone away behind dark clouds. Everything fell into a sepia. 

“Listen Alex,” Kara began, “There’s one more thing that we found at the lab along with all the documents.”

Alex startled. “Kara, I’ve  _ just  _ gotten off the phone about the grand jury. Why are you telling me now?”

Seeing Kara shrink back slightly, Maggie stepped in. “Because it isn’t anything to do with that.”

“What is it?”

Alex took the case with a frown, and then all expression fell from her face as she looked at the date in black marker. 

“It’s about your dad,” Maggie quietly confirmed. 

“About the night he died.”

Alex’s resignation meant she knew they had seen it without asking. She turned in half a circle, staring down at the case. Then she walked towards her office, one careful footfall at a time, like a funeral procession. 

She stopped at the top of the grand staircase, as if there was a barrier. Glancing at each other, Maggie and Kara trailed after her. With glassy eyes, she looked over her shoulder at them both. 

“Will you come with me?” she asked thickly. 

Kara rubbed her back. “Of course.”

They both took the next step forward, then Alex turned and searched for Maggie’s hand. “You too?”

There were so many questions left to answer, but walking down the remaining hallway to Alex’s office was a done deal.

“Of course.”

She took Alex’s hand and gripped it tight. The trio went into the office and shut the door behind them.

The future could wait, just for now. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading, I really hope you enjoyed. 
> 
> There is a little epilogue for this planned, so if that's something you're interested in, lemme know! :)


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